Clover-Edition/data/Apocalypse/412369.txt

The Shattered Genesis
T. Rudacille

Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2014 T. Rudacille

Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.
Cover image courtesy of chrisroll/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Cover Design by Alex Piluk. 
Dedication: For Nunny, who has believed in Brynna since before she was written.


The Shattered Genesis
Eternity Series: Book One

BEGIN: YEAR 1


Part I: The Exodus

Brynna

I pretended not to notice the two unabashedly obnoxious college jocks in the corner of the room talking about me. Despite the differences in our chromosomes that some would say result in me, a woman, never being able to understand them, little boys, I could imagine their inane, sexually charged babble as clearly as I could see the untouched drink on the table in front of me. I could feel their hormones raging and their egos inflating vividly, as if they were actually drilling said babble painfully into my ears. I had never had much respect for younger men. I had been around too long to be swayed by what they believed to be smooth-talking.
I was twenty-two physically. Only physically.
I began to contemplate the true meaning of age and time, only to be baffled a mere minute into my mental debate. Normally, I could sit and stew over the topic for hours, attempting to make sense of it all. But that night, I just wanted my brain to shut down, to submerge itself in silence. I was sick of raging thoughts.
Instead of trying to understand the deeper meaning of things, I switched my concentration over to the bar I was in and the patrons that surrounded me. A group of girls around my physical age were sitting directly behind me having an enthusiastic debate about something that was obviously of dire importance. I allowed myself to listen in as one of these girls allowed her spirited indignation to reach its maximum point of intensity; she raised her voice suddenly, shouting about an 'idol' and something called a jay-low. I wondered if perhaps idolatry had become a new college trend. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.
I zeroed in on a conversation that was occurring between a man and a woman who were also of my physical age. Every now and then, he would smile at something she said, or vice versa. They shared a quiet laugh, and with a roll of my eyes, I decided that they were like every other couple I had ever seen, and their rapidly changing topics, all of which were painfully uninteresting, would soon bore me to sleep if I continued to listen in so nosily. I shut them out and moved on to a group of particularly average looking people in the back of the room.
“I am sorry, but there is no way that Tolstoy is better than Dickens!” One particularly agitated boy exclaimed with an emphatic slam of his fist on the tabletop. My eyebrows raised when the shaky table gave an ominous wobble that left the glasses rattling violently in the aftershock of his blow. His friends laughed at his dramatic flair and spirited indignation, and his face that had begun to redden from the effects of his third beer broke into a lopsided, almost dreamy grin.
Well, at least they knew who Tolstoy and Dickens were. As their conversation continued, however, I found their frequent hand-gesturing and the very discreet way they were looking around to make sure people were listening to their conversation to be brash aggravating. “Look at how smart we are, world. You can only wish you knew what we were talking about!” 
Oh, God or Gods, I thought, spare me from such ludicrous shows of artificiality...
Now one might wonder what a condescending non-human would be doing in a place like that. Was I so miserable that I had to sit smack in the middle of a rerun of some ridiculous 90's prime-time drama or some wannabe smartly written sitcom and denounce their players in my mind? The short answer: Yes. It made me feel superior.
My thoughts were rudely interrupted when one of the aforementioned obnoxious jocks approached my lonely table by the window. I know how cliché it must sound, but the smell of alcohol that wafted over me as soon as he opened his crooked mouth forced images of unshaven homeless men buried under piles of filthy rags to pop into my mind in unwelcome clarity.
His future... I thought, having to fight off a smirk as the next thought tumbled to the forefront of my mind, Okay, that was awful...”
“I don't recognize you.” He told me loudly over the sea of voices as he plopped his remarkably sizable posterior into the seat across from me. The chair creaked under his weight.
Was chivalry really that dead?
“I don't recognize you, and I know everyone.”
Now, I had two different courses of action plotted and ready to go in my head. I could humor him and allow him to think he had a shot only so I could turn him down flat after he made his sloppy, drunken pitch. Or I could turn him away and be a humanitarian about the whole damn thing.
“Everyone?” I responded as I turned my head and looked at the television propped up on the wall behind the bar. The news was on; on the screen there was some diagram of the solar system with an arrow pointing far away from the reaches of our sun. I turned my head to look at him. In the dim light his features contorted, taking away his boyish good looks and replacing them with the features of a quizzical spider monkey; his arms were elongated and drooping at his sides and his uncommonly dark eyes were studying me with more curiosity than I expected. After blinking once, his appearance shifted again and that time, I was startled by the change; his nose had flattened, and his nostrils grew taller and thinner. In his black eyes, I saw a dangerous lust. I had just taken a sip of my watered down margarita and wondered if perhaps it was stronger than I realized.
“Everyone.” He replied, and I was tempted to say, “Everyone?” back again to see how long I could keep him repeating himself. “And I have definitely never seen you before.”
“You wouldn't. I don't go to school here.”
“You don't?” He asked, his voice rising as he prepared to give an impassioned monologue on why his overpriced Ivy League school was the best in the world. “It's only the greatest...”
Well, that was enough human contact for one evening...
“While I am sure that is going to be one rousing speech, I am actually on my way out. It was so...” I rolled my eyes to the sky, “nice talking to you.”
Anyone with half a brain would be able to tell that I was being sarcastic. But this young man did not have half a brain.
“I have a scholarship there. Football.”
“Yes, that happens commonly, as I hear it. Lumbering voids like yourself getting essentially paid to go to school just to use your large motor skills in brainless sports, and those actually interested in bettering themselves through education having to pay with money, possessions, the rights to their first born sons, et cetera. But really, you look like you are in pain now. I have lost you. Silly me, even as I was referring to you as a lumbering void, I forgot that you were one and went on one of my intricate rant with no concern for your mental discomfort. My apologies.” I started to gather up my bag and stand. He rose to his feet. “I hope your major in Business Communication is enough to cradle you if and when your professional football career just does not come to fruition.”
“How did you know I was majoring…”
“Oh, you lot always are.” I replied slowly, knowingly, with my trademark condescending grin.
“I get it.” He pointed at me, nodding slightly as something dawned on him that escaped me, strangely enough. “You like girls, right?”
“No.” I replied, unable to remove that small, disdainful smile from my face. “I just don't like boys.”
The girls who had been gabbing about the idols exclaimed in what I assumed to be shock but as it turns out, was actually a thrilled cry of feminine unity. One held her hand up to me as I passed, and for the hell of it, I slapped it, allowing her to believe that we had formed an estrogen-charged bond, however short-lived it may have been. At the very least, I gifted those girls with a line to use when dribbling morons in a bar came up to them looking to, as the young people call it, “score.”
Once I walked outside, the wonderfully harsh winter wind filled my lungs and cut at my exposed skin. I walked to the curb and dug into my purse, looking for my ever-present pack of Camels. I found them and pulled one from the pack, crushing the filter and putting the cigarette between my lips. Now, for the real challenge: the lighter search.
It was while I was rooting around in my bag that I became aware of someone standing next to me. I looked to see a middle-aged man leaning against the street-light's post and outstretching his lit lighter to me. I know it sounds girlish and stupid, but I had always wanted someone to light my cigarette for me. I couldn't fight the strange glow I felt well up inside of my chest as I leaned forward and lit my cigarette in the flame he was holding.
“Thank you.” I said, and after that, I was lost as to what to say, so in staying true to my social awkwardness, I studied him closely for a long moment. He was at least forty, perhaps even a little older. I was never very skilled at pinning down someone's age by mere guessing. He was in need of a shave, but not desperately; his stylish goatee was starting to spread out across his face like an army of insurgent troops waging war on an untouched plain. His hair was gelled and styled in that perfectly calculated mess that men seemed to favor in those days.
“You're welcome.” He replied politely. He seemed to take no notice of me analyzing every detail of his appearance. “So, not to sound strange, but I was watching you.”
“That sounds very strange.” I said before exhaling smoke away from him.
“I know it does. In the bar, I was watching you. You seemed awfully disdainful.”
“That's my general state of being, I suppose. I didn't think that it was so obvious.”
“Well, I can assure you that it is.”
“Okay. Thank you for letting me know.” I looked out at the street as the cars flew past, letting the noises of the evening fill my ears in hopes of drowning out any more of his observations on my character. But it isn't easy to drown out someone who is standing right next to you, and even the horns blaring and the rushing whir of the traffic couldn't suppress his voice.
“Do you often shoot down the advances of young men?”
“Who are you, the official spokesperson for the conversational and social rights of horny, drunken, college frat boys?” I asked, knowing that I was being prickly and as he suggested, disdainful. But as I said, disdain was constantly flowing from my lips and mind. It was my dominant status.
“No. Just an interested observer.”
“If you're trying to avoid sounding strange, please be aware that your attempt is not even close to believable, let alone totally convincing. You are failing miserably.”
“So are you.”
“I don't try to sound normal anymore.” I informed him somewhat more defensively than I had intended. “It just makes me look as pathetically stupid as those young twits in that bar.”
“Aren't you their same age?”
“I am. But I'm not a twit.”
“I like your use of the word 'twit.' One rarely hears that in conversation these days.”
“I like to keep a wide variety of insults handy, even if I am not insulting a person or a group of people to their face or faces, respectively.”
“Are you an English major?”
I chuckled to myself for a moment, thinking about how odd the conversation was becoming. Was he trying to pick me up or was he trying to annoy me? Neither option seemed particularly befitting of him.
“I would have been, I suppose.” I told him. “At least you went with 'English major.' Generally, when people hear me talk, they assume I must have a mental deficiency. One young man, who must have thought he was God's gift to the mental health profession, told me once that he felt, in his not-so-professional opinion that I was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome.”
“And what did you say?” The man asked me. “May I?” He indicated the pack of cigarettes that I had started to put back into my bag.
I handed one to him and watched closely as he lit it up. I couldn't help noticing that it was quite attractive the way he expertly inhaled and exhaled the smoke.
Snapping out of my own observance, I answered his question.
“I said that was an insult to people with Asperger's Syndrome.”
He was the one who laughed softly now.
“I read a lot as a child and still read a lot today. That might be the reason for my advanced sentence structure, I suppose. I did take a test while I was in school to determine my IQ. Apparently, it was quite high. But I have never put much stock into that. I find tests that are meant to define one's intelligence to be, in most cases, horribly misleading.”
“Is it an effortless thing? The way you talk, I mean?”
“I suppose so. I don't feel like I am putting much effort into it.”
“I see.” He nodded. “So where are you headed?”
I looked at him again, raising my eyebrows slightly. I had given the idea of him trying to pick me up and trying to annoy me the appropriate amount of thought but I had never pondered the possibility that he might be dangerous. To not immediately think the worst of a man was a new and very undesirable turn of events in my world.
“See, that was me sounding strange again. I know exactly what you're thinking.”
“That you're a rapist and a murderer? That's what I'm thinking.” I was starting to back away very slowly, so as not to give away my plan to run should he give me a reason to.
“Well, I didn't think you'd immediately go to rapist and murderer.” Every step of distance I put between him and me, he immediately mimed. “But dangerous, yes. I did assume that's what you were thinking.”
“Well, you assume correctly even if you did not correctly gauge the level of danger I believed I was in. Have a good night, dear sir.”
I turned away, expecting him to shake his head and continue on in the opposite direction. Instead, he caught up with me and began to saunter along at my side as I walked.
“Alright, I'll admit it,” I told him as my body began to tremble and my feet carried me forward at an even quicker pace. “You're officially starting to worry me.”
“Sorry.” He replied apathetically before turning his gaze to meet mine. With an intense warning in his eyes, he muttered, “Just go with it, okay?”
“No, I will not 'go with it!’” I snapped at him, stopping in mid-stride and turning around. I was going to go back to the bar and ask one of those drunken morons to walk me home. They probably would refuse, but I would risk rejection in hopes of gaining safe passage to my apartment. I would allow their advances to continue just until I was safely inside with the door locked securely behind me. I would take their endless chattering about football, or my physique and all the things they would like to do to it in order to avoid being assaulted by this strange man who was walking beside me.
“Brynna? That's your name, isn't it?” He asked calmly. I stopped walking and turned to him.
“So you're a stalker, too?!” I exclaimed before reaching into my bag and rooting around for the other item I constantly kept on me: my pepper spray. Just as I was about to dump the contents of my purse onto the sidewalk in order to find it, I looked up to see him holding the canister between his thumb and forefinger.
“You left your bag on the back of your chair.” He explained before placing my only possible weapon in his jacket pocket.
“Alright, I want you to listen to me,” I kept my voice steadier and bolder than anyone could possibly feel in a moment like that, “I don't know who you are. I don't know if this is because you're just craving sexual contact or if it’s in response to some familial crisis that you experienced as a child...” I was rambling, trying to keep him at bay with my ridiculous over-thought and unnecessary musings. “But I can assure you that I am not experienced in sex and as a result, not good at it. Okay?”
Leave it to me to still be over-analyzing someone even as I faced the prospect of being horribly violated. Call it my defense mechanism. I firmly believed that I could talk my way out of anything. It was the last straw of hope I grasped at when faced with trauma.
I didn't realize it but I was backing away from him slowly, preparing for the moment when I would drop my bag and run back to the bar. I looked behind me and my heart iced over with the unthinkably strong intensity of absolute, desperate terror. The two jocks from the bar had been following in our wake like shadowed specters in the dark. The dim light cast by the street lamps contorted their features again or perhaps my own fear did that for me. Perhaps I was seeing them as appearing monstrous because I knew their unspeakable intentions.
“Oh, my God...” I whispered softly, and I tried to remember everything I knew about adrenaline rushes and the inherent, animal instinct to stay alive. Whoever said that when one is in a bind they can suddenly become unstoppable fighting machines clearly never experienced the fear that prey feels. They especially did not account for when the prey had felt that same suffocating fear before...
“Listen to me, Brynna.” The man was walking towards me, reaching one hand out slowly.
“Do not come near me! I...” I scrambled for something, anything to scare him away. “I have a knife!”
The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could fully realize just how ridiculous I sounded. Why would I have reached for pepper spray when I had a weapon that would end the current shenanigans in a more severely final way?
I've always considered myself as being of much higher intellect than almost everyone else on the earth. But in situations where one feels what I felt at that moment, it just does not matter what some faulty IQ test said about you. There is nothing to do, say, or think; there is only the swelling, smothering fear in your chest, paralyzing you while mentally driving you to act. It was a blip in nature, to experience that simultaneous urgent prodding and frozen hesitation, and it was a blip that was frustratingly paradoxical, to say the least.  
“Just walk with me.” The man instructed calmly as he reached out his hand to me. “You have no chance of outrunning them...”
“Oh, my God...” I muttered again. I looked all around me frantically for a way out. I couldn't go back to the bar and I couldn't run straight ahead. But there were no cars coming, and I knew that if I had any chance at all, it would begin with me running across the street.
I turned and darted into the road, narrowly avoiding being mowed down by a cab that appeared from nowhere and went rushing by with its horn blaring and a curse word being screamed out of the window by the driver. I had never been skilled at sports or any type of physical activity; I possessed the endurance of an eighty year old with chronic arthritis and spots on her lungs. But with that adrenaline coursing through me, I ran, as some clever person who thinks up clichés once said, like the devil was chasing me, which in my mind, he was.
But just as that expression took a lap around my mind, I became aware of the fact that no one was chasing me in reality. I stopped running, allowing myself to stand panting on the sidewalk, leaned up against the brick wall of a closed health food store and ruing the day I started smoking as it limited my already hindered capacity for prolonged physical activity. I looked around, back up the street towards the music blaring out of the open door of the bar I had just left. I saw no one.
“Okay...” I muttered to myself, realizing that I was trembling even more intensely. I continued to walk quickly despite the tightness in my chest that made my heart feel as though it was attempting to beat through cellophane. If there were people around, I like to think that I would have asked for help, but out of fear of looking like a crazed albeit well-dressed drunk on the street, I probably would have just barreled on past them as though I was just in a big hurry. In the city, no one would think anything of a twenty-two year old young woman speed walking down the sidewalk. No one would ask questions.
I was alone and looking over my shoulder almost against my will, expecting to see those three men following me. I tried to stop myself from picturing their motives but unfortunately, my brain stirred up horrendous scenarios that played inside my head like cheap, exploitative B-movies at a 1970's grind-house.
I do apologize for all the similes. But sometimes these figures of speech are the only way to truly convey an emotion. They are the last ditch effort of those who cannot make sense of things, even years later.
I reached around in my bag, looking for my cellphone as I continued to power-walk home. I avoided shrieking in frustration when I found that it was missing. What else had that man taken from my bag? I didn't have the time to stop and check. I just had to get inside. I just had to lock myself in the safe confines of my apartment, where I would immediately begin trying to forget the awful turn of events my first night out in months had taken.
I had only seen civilian cars pass by for the duration of my trek. A cab hadn't passed since the one that nearly left me pancake-flat on the asphalt. If I saw one and was able to get inside, I contemplated throwing my arms around the driver and thanking him for being in the right place at the right time. I imagined the relief that would flow through me as I crawled into the warm cab and began to put as much distance between me and that bar as possible. I would even kiss the driver's cheek just to show him how thankful I was for his arrival and rescue. I am sure he would have already experienced stranger things than that in his career.
But no cab rolled down the street, and I was left walking alone. No one passed by me, either. I looked at my watch and rolled my eyes; it was almost two A.M. and everything was beginning to wind down in our fair city. Leave it to me to lose track of time. But then, how could I ever have imagined that something so terrible would happen? Several years earlier, I had stayed out until well past two in the morning many times and never once encountered a group of demented sadists.
Of course, times had changed very much in those two years.
When I finally came around the corner, and my building came into view, I could have cried. I would have, if I had been physically able to do so. My reprieve was short-lived, however; with another strong dose of supreme horror, I realized that the same two jocks were lurking outside my building, their athletically hefty forms sitting prone on the bench just across the street.
I mumbled a very rare expletive and ducked into the alleyway beside the building that was four over from mine. After I had cussed once, a whole stream of colorful words and terms spewed out of my mouth. How did they know where I lived? What could they possibly want? It could not just have been to assault me at that point, and honestly, was my insult really so damaging to their already far out of proportion egos that they had to hunt me down and harm me over it? I cursed myself and my big mouth. I cursed my own over-inflated ego. I cursed the day I realized I was not normal.
Throughout all of that cursing, I didn't think about where the third man, the one who had spoken to me, was lurking. As I stomped and kicked like a child having a particularly contemptuous tantrum, I didn't hear his footsteps approaching behind me. But even if I had been completely silent, I still wouldn not have heard him. Just as I poked my head around the wall, I felt his hand wrap around from behind me and hold firmly to my mouth as he pulled me backwards.
Forget all human tendencies. Forget the thought processes and emotions that elevate us above other mammals. The moment I felt him pulling me back into the darkness of the alleyway, I fought like any other animal in a struggle for its life. At first, I just thrashed around wildly, attempting to weaken the painfully strong grip he had on me. Quickly, I realized attempting some actual defense was my only hope.
I opened my mouth and sunk my teeth down into his hand while simultaneously kicking my foot back to nail him perfectly between the legs. He suppressed a cry of pain by just grunting like a wounded hippopotamus, which I would have found hilarious had I not been in a fight for my life. After his hand released my mouth, I took in an unbelievably capacious gasp of air and screamed. As a child, before I decided against having friends, my companions and I used to have competitions to see who could scream the loudest. I always won. But those screams were nothing compared to the real thing; I was sure that everyone in the metropolitan area had heard me.
But just as the last bit of air was exhaled from my lungs, his hand was clamped over my mouth again.  When I opened my mouth to bite him again, he swung my body hard to one side, causing my head to slam against the brick wall of the alley hard. I tried to scream but the sound choked off as silver and white stars danced in shimmering pools of black in front of my eyes. I collapsed back against him, struggling to stay awake as the ground slid sideways abruptly, right out from beneath my feet. I was hanging upside down with nothing keeping me attached to the earth but him anymore. I was preparing to tumble head over heels into the starless black sky. I would keep falling forever...
I snapped out of those thoughts just as I began to feel the sensation of falling. My head rolled painfully to one side and rested against something that scratched at my skin.
I started to mutter something but I felt his hand press to my mouth again.
“Do not say anything.” His voice whispered fiercely to me and instantly, that fight sparked to life once again. I pictured a phoenix roaring back to life from its own ashes, from its own demise. But with my head spinning and exhaustion beginning to take over me, the phoenix's life was snuffed out by one mighty wave of ocean water.
My eyes shot open, widening when I became aware that I was submerged in complete darkness. There were three peculiar, nickel-sized holes in the black wall in front of my eyes and through them, I could see the alley clearly. I attempted to move my head but found that it weighed far too much for my small neck to support. That was new. Before, I had a completely normal head, of a completely average weight.
Strange, I thought to myself.
The scratchiness that I felt against my head was the man's stubble; my forehead was rested against his cheek. I wanted to exclaim in disgust at having to lean against him simply because my body refused to support the weight of my newly very heavy head. I would have exclaimed in disgust, if I hadn't heard an ominous growl just outside where we were hidden.
“Don't say anything.” The man behind me hissed even more urgently in my ear. He reached up to press what felt like a thick piece of cloth to my wound and held my head against him firmly.
They can smell the blood... My mind whispered tremulously. I knew that by instinct alone, before I even knew what they were. 
 I heard a growl that was even more eerily distressing than the first. For some reason, in my delusional state, the second growl sounded almost conversational, almost as though this animal (it had to be an animal) was trying to communicate with another.
All thoughts shut off quite suddenly, though, when an impossibly gargantuan creature walked right into my field of vision. I prayed that what I was seeing was a contortion of reality brought on by my head injury and the fact that my glasses had flown off in the fight. Whatever that monstrous being was, it appeared to stand at least eight feet tall. It had to have weighed well over six hundred pounds. Physically, it was shaped like a human, in that it had two arms, two legs, a head and a torso. It was clothed in black scraps of fabric and matted fur. At the end of its long arms, I saw that its fingernails were elongated and sharpened to thick, dangerously pointed claws. Hair that was long and black hung down past its broad shoulders. When it dropped down onto all fours and began to sniff the ground, I began to beg whatever higher power existed to spare me from seeing its face. Somehow, I knew that the sight of it would snatch the breath from my lungs and freeze my racing heart in its hurried tracks.
That higher power had it in for me, though, because just as I began to plead, a second creature identical to the first dropped down in front of our hiding place. The man behind me must have known that I was going to gasp because once again, his hand was covering my mouth. He needn't have silenced me though, because the indescribably appalling face looking at me through those three holes in the darkness, those harrowing black eyes staring into my own were enough to make the world flip out from underneath of me again and send me tumbling backwards into space.
The fall into eternity was less frightening than those eyes.
***

I did not want to wake up. I did not want to confront the situation in which I knew I would find myself. I was not given the luxury of being able to believe that everything that had occurred had been a dream. The memories were too vivid, too nightmarishly grotesque to be ignored or downplayed. So when my eyes snapped open, I prepared myself for another fight. I prepared to find myself in an unfamiliar setting, accompanied by the strange man I had met.
I was right about the former but wrong about the latter. When I awoke in an unfamiliar bedroom, I was alone. I sat up abruptly, drawing in one gasp before panting as the terror from the night before seized me. Outside, the first blue light of dawn was breaking on the horizon. I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand to confirm that it was six-thirty AM. I had been passed out for only three hours. Beside the alarm clock was my canister of pepper spray and cellphone. A note was lying beside them written in a hurried scrawl:

Had to run out. I figured you would want these back.

I rolled my eyes and took the can and phone in my hands. I held the phone in front of my face to find that I had only one missed call from Maura, whom we will call my “nanny” for the time being. I couldn't quite discern why she would be calling me between the hours of two and five AM, and I didn't have time to ponder it, as I heard the front door open and close.
Despite the throbbing in my head, I began to prepare myself for a fight. I turned, holding the pepper spray up in front of my face, and steadied my hand. I would spray every last bit of the can's contents at the beastly so-and-so the moment he came through the door.
“Brynna, I just want to talk to you. Put it down.”
Either I'm predictable or the beastly so-and-so could see through doors. While I was a fan of fantasy novels and films, I was not naïve. I stayed grounded in the real world at all times. As a result of that, I opted to believe the former.
“If you come in here, I will spray all of it into your eyes.” I warned him, just to be fair.
“Then I guess it would be prudent for me to stay out here and talk to you, wouldn't it?”
“Just move out of the way and let me leave. I don't want to hear anything you have to say.” I gathered all of my nerve to say what I said next. “I am opening the door and coming out.”
What bravery it took for me to say that was nothing compared to the brash stupidity it took to actually do it. My fear silently reached its piercing crescendo and yet I threw open the door, still holding the canister up. I maneuvered my way out into a narrow hallway.
“I am not looking at you. I barely remember what you look like. After last night, after...” I trailed off, keeping my head down as I continued to walk with his form visible only in my upper peripheral vision and nowhere else. “I don't know what you look like.”
“Am I really so forgettable?” He asked, and I grimaced at his lame attempt to make a joke. He was trying to gain my trust. He was trying to charm me into letting my guard down but he didn't quite know with whom he was dealing. I had read extensively on psychopathology and considered myself a bit of an expert on the matter. I knew how terrible people worked.
I turned so that I was walking backwards, keeping my eyes to the floor while still being able to see his outline.
“Your head looks terrible. You need to let me take a look at it. I'll even give you a knife to hold, if it will make you feel better about things.”
What in the world? His sarcasm was not meant to irritate. It was meant to entertain. I could not help but shake my head at just how strange he was.
“I will go to the hospital.” I muttered hurriedly. “I will go and have it taken care of, thank you so much. But I won't go to the police. You have my word on that. I promise. I swear to God, I won't go to the police.”
“Good. They wouldn't help you, anyway.”
“Okay.” I agreed blindly just to pacify him. “You're right.”
I had come to the door of his apartment. I reached backwards and opened it before darting away without looking back. The pepper spray was still firmly grasped in my hand but I would not stop to use it. I threw open the door to the staircase and hurried down the steps, barely watching where my feet landed. Once or twice, I lost my footing and stumbled forward, but my trembling legs managed to catch me before I went tumbling painfully to the landing.
When I burst out onto the street, I was greeted by the sound of early morning traffic and a burst of fresh air that awoke every sense my body possessed. My breath billowed out in front of me, reminiscent of cigarette smoke; I yearned for a charge of nicotine in my blood. I would only be calmed by the jolt it provided in each sacred puff.
Shaking that thought from my head, I started to walk briskly, looking over my shoulder with almost every step I took. It was a relief not to have my purse, I realized. All I had was my pepper spray and my cellphone. Anything else would have slowed me down.
I looked around for any familiar landmarks to tell me where I was. I had never been skilled at memorizing street names and intersections. I always used places to mark where I was in the city. But apparently, I had never ventured as far out as I was then. Not a single building or business helped determine my exact whereabouts.
It was ridiculous and ineffably stupid but I just couldn't bring myself to call Maura. I couldn't stand the idea of having to describe what had happened the night before. I was not capable of churning out some fantastical story to explain what I was doing in an unfamiliar section of town at six-thirty AM. I walked a little further, urging myself not to allow the quiet fear that I felt bubbling inside of me to boil over into a frenzied panic. I had been able to escape which made me luckier than most women. I had to put distance between myself and the man who had taken me.
Only a handful of people walked past me. I could have asked any one of them for directions, I knew. But as I turned and watched the fourth person I had passed keep walking, I suddenly realized that if I were to speak to anyone in the state of anxiety I was in, I would end up spilling the events of the previous night to them. A crazed albeit well-dressed (and now severely bruised) drunk on the street...
“Alright.” His voice said behind me, and I jumped, shock throbbing through my body like an electrical current. I needed to act defensively; after whipping around, I emptied my can of pepper spray blindly in the direction from which I had heard his unwelcome voice.
 When I opened my eyes that had been squeezed shut throughout the duration of my attack, I didn't see him writhing on the ground in agony, howling about how I, a crazy female dog, had just burnt his eyes out. Maybe, like when I had kicked him the night before, he just wasn't verbally announcing to me and any passerby that he was in pain. Maybe that just wasn't how he operated. Strange...
“If I were a rapist,” He walked out from behind the wall, and I threw the can of pepper spray at him in frustration and above all else, in resignation. Easily, he moved sideways slightly so it could fly right past his head. He raised his eyes to look into mine, “would I have let you walk out like that?”
“You didn't let me do anything!” I half-yelled, pointing at him with a shaking finger. “I ran away! I escaped!”
He nodded.
“Okay. Yeah, sure, you escaped.”
“Shut up!” Now I was shouting and covering my ears for a minute of solace. “You... you... Go away!”
“Brynna, you're going to scare people.”
“I don't care! What is wrong with you?!” I turned and continued to huff up the street. He strode forward to catch up to me. “Just go away, you crazy, evil...”
“Evil? Is that why I saved your life last night?”
“Oh, are you being poetic? Are you being ironic?” I snapped at him as we turned onto a particularly busy street. “Did you date-raping me last night 'save my life'?”
“You think I date-raped you?” He asked me, and I could hear a note of anger in his voice. I noticed that as he said those words, two of the people on the street gave him hilariously quizzical and disgusted looks. “What, dare I ask, gave you that impression? What do you remember about last night?”
“I don't want to remember anything about last night. So, shut up and go away!”
“You didn't answer my question. If I were a rapist, would I be letting you walk out amongst people? Would I let you keep going?”
“Maybe you're going to blackmail me. Maybe you want money or something. How the hell am I supposed to know exactly what goes on in the mind of a crazy person? I thought I had a pretty good idea, but you will be pleased to know I have officially recognized that I have absolutely no idea!”
“Let's go somewhere and get something to eat.”
“I don't know you!” I stopped walking and turned to him, infuriated now. “I don't want to know you! I don't care who you are, what your motives are, or about any scenario that doesn't involve me getting home!”
“Those things are still outside of your apartment, Brynna.”
Hearing that made me stop my indignant trek and turn to him again.
“You thought you had imagined them?” He asked, raising his eyebrows. “That's sweet that you're allowing yourself to be so naïve.”
“I know that I imagined them.” I hissed at him dangerously. “They were projections. They were physical manifestations of the uncomfortable feeling that you provoked in me. They were brought into sight by an elevated heart rate and an adrenaline rush. Thank you for that, by the way.”
“Please, just come with me, and we'll talk. I'll explain everything to you. I know you're afraid.” He reached out and grasped my arm gently but I shook him off.
“Do not touch me! Just...” I closed my eyes and put my hand on my head, the dull throbbing I had felt since I awoke morphing suddenly into a full-fledged, knee-buckling pain and world-twirling dizziness.
“Okay...” He put both hands on my arms now and turned me so we could keep walking in the direction I had been going. “There's a diner up the street here. We'll go in there. I'll buy. See? I am a nice guy.”
“Please just go away...” I muttered to him, and for the first time, I felt the threat of impending tears. He must have heard the crackling in my voice as well because as he steered me along, he rubbed my arm comfortingly.
“I promise, I'll explain everything as soon as we're sitting down.”
It was against my better judgment, but I followed him into the diner and sat down across from him at a small booth in the corner, away from the prying eyes and ceaselessly listening ears of the other patrons. I kept my face in my hands and muttered, “If I believed in God, I would be praying right now...”
“Look at me.”
It wasn't an order. It was merely a gentle suggestion. I raised my eyes to look at him, and he spoke again.
“I know that this is asking a lot. Believe me, I do. But I need you to trust me, Brynna.”
“I don't know you.” I implored him, feeling desperation more strongly than I was comfortable with. “I have no idea why I woke up in your bedroom this morning. Well, I do have an idea, but I wish I didn't. You have to know that I come from money, and my family will pay you whatever you want. This is a strange way to go about assaulting someone, but whatever, I don't want to think about that, either. I won't over-analyze you for fear of losing my mind.”
“Alright. My turn to talk.” He told me lightly as he slid my pack of cigarettes across the table to me. “That's my peace offering. Is it working?”
“You,” I tapped my head against my open palms, “are...” I did it again, “so...” And again, “strange!”
“I need you to understand and accept this as being true: I did not hurt you in any way last night.”
“You slammed my head up against a brick wall. That hurt me severely.”
“I didn't mean to do that as hard as I did. But I had no choice. Those things were coming, and I had to get you to stop making noise.”
“Those things weren't real! Why are you telling me that they were?”
The waitress came over and he ordered a coffee with no cream or sugar. The woman gnashed her teeth into a huge wad of gum as she asked me what I wanted. My head jerking from side to side was the only answer I offered to her question.
“She has a bit of a migraine. A coffee will help, I think.” The man ordered for me. My fingers were pressed to my temples. I scowled up at him.
“Caffeine.” The waitress nodded in agreement. “Best thing for them, sweetie.”
I jerked my head up and down, still trying to wrap my head around what was happening.
“Ask Dr. Oz what the best thing is for a pesky, delusional assailant when she comes back with the coffee.” I muttered to him, but then I shook my head slightly and closed my eyes. “That was rude. She is just trying to help.”
“It was rude. It was also thought of quickly, which must mean that you're returning to normal. Or whatever is normal for you, I should say.”
“Why are you acting like you know me? You don't know anything about me!”
“I don’t? Well, let’s see…” He breathed in deeply, looking up at the ceiling, pretending to be thinking deeply. “Your name is Brynna Olivier. Your mother is a senator and your father runs a popular news organization. The channel, the newspaper, the website, it’s all his. I know that you currently reside in a one bedroom apartment, alone, because you have never quite mastered real human contact. You joke frequently about being a 'non-human.' You call yourself a genius who doesn't worry herself with petty human attachment in public but in private, you wonder if perhaps there's something seriously wrong with you. You think you might be a robot, a cyborg, that sort of thing.” He lit up one of my cigarettes and inhaled deeply.
“Are you here to tell me I'm a cyborg?” He handed me another cigarette that he had just lit up. I took it gratefully.
“No.” He shook his head. 
“Are you here to tell me I am a sociopath? I hear that quite frequently.”
“I'm here to tell you that you're special.”
“Special...” I muttered doubtfully as the coffee arrived at our table. “I think this really will help. Thank you so much.” I smiled up at the waitress who seemed genuinely shocked by my gratitude. I hoped that my sudden change of tone towards her would greatly improve her day.
The scowl returned once I had looked back at the man across from me.
“Do I have super powers, too?” I asked quite sardonically.
He chose to ignore my snide remark and continue talking, but I could have sworn, and I still can swear, that there was the hint of a knowing smile on his face. After I blinked and saw that the smile was gone in that moment, however, I convinced myself that I had imagined it. 
“I also know that you are genuinely distrustful of men. You don't care for them. You don't enjoy their company, especially if they are your own age.” He eyed me cautiously for a moment before plowing ahead. “But really, at any age, you don't want them anywhere near you. All of that is a direct result of the fact...”
I slammed my hand on the table, shocking him, myself, and the rest of the people in the restaurant with my outburst.
After a long moment of silence between us, he responded to my explosion of rage airily.
“You apparently have a temper, too. I didn't know that, actually.”
“I get it. You know a lot about me. All of those things could be learned with a Google search or assumed through fanciful speculation. What? Do you want to know about my parents? Are you a reporter? Do you want an inside scoop on my mother? She is up for re-election. Are you trying to skewer her?”
“I know that you'd be more than willing to skewer her, but no.”
“I want to know, right now, what exactly it is that you want. If you don't tell me, I am going to walk out of here. Then, I am going to go straight to the police and tell them that there is a crazy, debonair man in a designer suit who lives on the street over from the...” I looked at the menu that was stuck jauntily behind the napkin container, “Gary's Diner who plays ridiculous mind games on unsuspecting young girls!”
“I told you, the police won't help you.”
“What? Are you funding them? Do you have money to buy them off so that you can play said ridiculous mind games on unsuspecting young girls?”
“No. But I do appreciate the fact that you think I'm debonair. My suit is designer, also, and I thank you for noticing that, as well.”
“You are so strange.” I muttered again as I shook my head slightly. “You defy all specific designations of mental illness. You are truly in a class of your own. You can take that as a compliment, I suppose.”
“I watched you last night in the bar because those two morons in the corner drinking themselves into a stupor were not what you think. They weren't, how did you describe them? Two horny, drunken college frat boys.”
“Then what were they?” I asked, exasperated.
“They were the same two things that came walking down the alley looking for you. They appeared to you as something that would make you comfortable at first. Well, they thought it would make you comfortable. Little did they know, you're a strange duck when it comes to interacting with people your own age.”
I actually began to laugh, quietly at first, but as I attempted to suppress it, I only grew more hysterical. Once, I actually snorted and had to cover my mouth and hurriedly apologize for the obnoxious sound through my giggles.
“What is this?” I asked, a renegade laugh escaping me again. “They were those two things that I saw? The two drunken college boys were actually monstrous beasts? What is that, a metaphor? Oh, I think it is! It is a really bad one, too.”
“Brynna, this world is going to end.”
I stopped laughing, realizing suddenly that I was poking fun at someone who clearly had mental deficiencies or a severe drug problem.
“There is a rehabilitation center close to my house.” I told him, actually squeezing his hand in mine for a quick second. “Since you know where I live, it will not be hard for you to find. Just walk up the street a piece from my house, turn left on Monroe, walk for about five minutes or eight, depending on your pace. Look on your left. You can't miss it.”
I stood up to go, but he reached out and grabbed my upper arm firmly in his hand.
“Let go of me, or I will start screaming.” I warned him dangerously.
But just then, a torrent of images whizzed vividly through my mind; a harsh flash of light, people falling to the ground, screaming in agony and covering their ears; a strange, deep silence and then, a deafening explosion that radiated to the farthest reaches of what we knew laid far beyond our earth. I pulled my hand away, my heart pounding again, a cold sweat starting to seep from every pore in my body. It had always been my worst fear. I had always pictured the day the world I knew would cease to exist. I had always known, somehow, that it would occur in my lifetime. I had seen it in my darkest dreams too many times to count.
I slid back into my chair and put my face on the table before reaching up and grasping the cup of coffee. Turning my head so my chin was rested on my arm, I brought the cup to my lips and took one shaky sip, hoping that the sudden heat would snap me out of that terrifyingly real dream.
“I know it's shocking.” His eyes took on a quiet fear I had not yet seen in him. “I know it's horrifying. Believe me, I reacted a lot worse than you when I realized it. Those things you saw are Reapers. They're hunting people. We don't know why they're here or where they're from, originally. I know it sounds crazy. Believe me, I do...”
I shook my head and looked up at him.
“No. I've...” I trailed off and unconsciously reached for my cigarettes. “I've always known it.” My eyes rose to meet his. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“What is your name?”
I know that he must have tried to fight it, but he did smile at the simplicity of the question before he answered it.
“James. James Maxwell.”
“Well, James Maxwell...” I exhaled smoke from my newly lit cigarette, drunk on the serenity brought to the surface by the gentle stream of nicotine that went coursing through my veins. “What are we supposed to do?”
“We, Brynna Olivier, are going to gather as many people as we can and leave here.”
“Leave the earth?” I asked softly in utter disbelief. It was impossible. Even if we successfully exited the atmosphere before our planet was consumed in a fiery blast, we would have nowhere to go. We would drift through the darkness of space, survivors of a dead race left to meet their end at a later date than the rest of our kind.
“Indeed. It's too much to explain now. But I'm sure you've heard about the other planet they've discovered. I'm sure that you've seen it on the news.”
The night before in the bar, I had seen that display on the television. I read the headline only halfway before losing interest. It had read, “Super-Earth ready for...” The rest would remain a mystery, and I would not have cared.
“Yes.” I nodded. “What does that have to do with this?”
“That's our destination. They've known about it for years. They've known about all of this for years.”
“Who is 'they'?”
“They are the people that we common folk so rarely get to see wearing their true faces.”
I nodded again.
“You sounded a little like Yoda when you said that, but I think I know to whom you are referring. I need a moment to process this.”
How strange to be sitting in a diner in the middle of the bustling city, sipping coffee and contemplating the impending end of the world. But after learning such a harrowing new reality, how could one possibly do anything else?
“Is it processed?” He asked me after a long, thoughtful silence.
“Not really. How do we choose who to take? What else do we take with us? How do you even know about this?”
“I discovered that this was coming. Then, a whole mess of strange things started to happen to me. That's a story for another time. Are you particularly hungry?”
“Not now. My God, how could I possibly be thinking about food?”
“Then, come with me. I want to show you something.”
***

By then, my curiosity far exceeded my common sense. The reason my level of intelligence was so high above that of others around me was because of my never fully quenched thirst for knowledge and my curiosity that had always bordered on recklessness. I read every piece of writing available regarding things that interested me and even on some things that did not for as long as I could remember. So, when James offered to show me his proof that the world was ending, I couldn't refuse, despite not trusting him. I just had to know the whole truth.
When we arrived back at his apartment, though, I did exercise a little common sense by staying close to the door. As you have learned by now, I am not a fool.
“I am trying to figure out if I am stupidly gullible or if I can actually trust you.”
“I don't expect you to trust me right away, Brynna.” He replied absentmindedly as he pulled a small shoebox from the bottom drawer of the desk in the corner of his living room. He brought it over to where I was sitting and allowed me to open it. I explored the contents: web pages that were printed out, whole phrases and single words highlighted; transcripts of phone conversations and email correspondences, and lastly, pictures of people I didn't recognize.
“I have to start off my explanation by telling you that all of this began with a dream. I saw everything that I just showed you at the diner in that dream.”
I was listening but not looking at him. I was still too busy studying the papers in the box. A highlighted phrase on one of the pages read “Pangaea is ready to be colonized.” What the hell?
“Now, I know that you are familiar with night terrors. I was, also. But this...” He shook his head slightly, and I looked at him, seeing that genuine fear come over his eyes once again. It flashed by for just one fleeting second that almost convinced me I had imagined it. “It was like nothing I had ever experienced. I can't explain it. All people say after a bad dream that it was so real, and that's why it was so terrifying. But with this, I could feel the blast and I could feel my skin burning when the fire reached me.”
“What is it? What is going to explode?”
“I don't know.” He replied, shaking his head and avoiding my eyes. “It must be a bomb. A nuclear weapon, I’m guessing.”
“So there is going to be a nuclear war?” I asked, and my heart started to pound quickly again.
“I think there is. Others are sure. That's the next part of the story. I tried to push the dream out of my mind. I tried to go about my life as usual. Do you know how when you have a nightmare, for those few minutes right after you wake up, you still feel the same fear that you felt while you were dreaming?”
I nodded.
“Well, I felt continually throughout the days and just assumed that my mind was going back to the dream periodically, or that it was kind of stuck there, at the back of my mind. But I couldn't shake it. I couldn't shake the feeling I had. Not that first day, or the next, or the next. So, finally, I went online and searched for everything I could think of to explain away what I had felt. Here's where it gets very, very weird.” He rustled around in the papers until he found the one he was looking for. It was a print out of a discussion on a message board. “You know about online Trends, I'm sure. Searching trends?”
“Yes.”
“Well, 'lucid dreaming' was the number one search for days. I don't know if you noticed that.”
“I did not,” I replied, “And even if I had, I wouldn't have thought anything of it.”
“No one would have unless they had experienced what I did. So when I searched, the first link that came up was this message board. It was created two days after I had the dream. Read it.”
My eyes scanned the page. All of the posters were recounting the same dream, the same apocalyptic vision that James had shown me. The details of the dream were minute, except for the place in which the worst of it occurred. One poster was from California and had seen Hollywood Boulevard going up in flames. One poster was from London and had seen Big Ben fall to the ground in a mass explosion. Quite disturbingly, one poster said he was from Australia and had seen the blast coming towards him across a long, endless plain.
“Landmarks,” I muttered, “Most of them, anyway. That's odd.”
“I thought so, too. I think it's symbolism.”
“That's what I was thinking.” I agreed. “James, these details…” I scanned the page for one, “‘Exactly one minute and fifteen seconds after the blast,’ '…remember noticing the sun being blocked out by a light even brighter than it is...'”
“Exactly.” He nodded. “So, we met. About seven or eight of us who lived here in the US decided to meet in Boston, but more than seven or eight showed up. It was closer to fifty. If you saw these people, Brynna,” He trailed off again, “You couldn't know. The fear was so strong. We were all terrified. We knew beyond any doubt that we had seen the end of the world. During that meeting, we matched up the details of our dream again and said we'd keep in touch. Of course, at that point, we didn't know how much time we had left.”
“Do you know now?”
“I'm getting there. That night, we all had another dream. This time, we saw faces of people we didn't recognize and names. We knew that they could be found in the areas around where we lived. We also saw the Reapers and other things that I won't burden you with.”
“No, please, burden me. I want to know.”
There was that reckless curiosity again. Luckily, James had my best interests at heart and didn't unload those particular details on me then. I would have curled up on the ground and awaited my fate, petrified of having to face the other things.
“Later. Now is not the time. I don't know why the Reapers are after you, Brynna, but I have seen what they do to most people once they get them.”
I bit my tongue to keep from asking for the gory details.
“So I saw you and knew everything about you inexplicably. I knew I had to find you and convince you to come with me.”
“Come with you where?” I asked, feeling a surge of desperation for finite answers suddenly. “Is that what this is?” I showed him the paper with the diagram of the planet they were calling “Pangaea.”
“Yes. Several of us worked for the government: NASA, the CIA, the military. The ones from NASA were the ones who told us they have made huge leaps in space travel over the years that they've never told anyone about.”
“Why didn't they tell anyone?”
“Because of this. They said they didn't know why, but they had been told to keep this a secret. So, they did, out of fear of losing their jobs. That's good for us, though. A spacecraft has been built. It's large enough to hold five thousand.”
“How did they build something like that without anyone snooping around?”
“That's the next part of the story. You are well aware, I'm sure, that things go on behind closed doors in our government that we never know about. I mentioned that to you earlier.”
“Yes.”
“They have known about this, Brynna. They have known that the end is coming, and the spacecraft was built to take them away from here before it hits.”
“But they're responsible for this!” I exclaimed as fury overtook what fragile hold I had on my self-control. “If it is nuclear, if it is an act of war, then they started it!”
“They did. But since when does anyone's personal responsibility override their need to survive? They were planning to leave us all here to die.”
“For their mistakes!”
“Yes. But that is not our main concern. It will please you to know that we have other ideas. Our job right now is to gather as many people as we can and leave here before this thing happens.”
“How many people had the dream? How many people are out there trying to gather up others?”
“In the US, about sixty, I've been told.”
“Sixty?!” I actually put my face down on my knees, needing a moment to process the grave impossibility ahead.
“Sixty.” James said calmly. “In other countries, put together, about four hundred.”
“Four hundred and sixty people are responsible for gathering up five thousand...” I took a deep breath that was meant to soothe me but only gave my heart the jolt it needed to beat faster. “We will never get enough, James.”
“We will. More and more people are having the dream, Brynna. More and more people are starting to realize what they have to do.”
“Why has no one said anything? Why has no one gone to the press?”
“Since when has the press ever believed anyone who predicted the end of the world?'
I did not reply, for I knew he was right.
“Plus, can you imagine the panic if people were to believe it? They're going to let this unfold without ever saying a word. No one will be warned.”
“So many people are going to die.” I whispered, more to myself than to him. The rush of blind consternation that went through me as that realization took hold is beyond anything I can describe. “There are billions of people in the world. There are good people who are all going to die now. There are children...”
It seemed ridiculous to say, but I just could not imagine a higher power so cruel that He would smite the world while children inhabited it. The notion of the innocent paying the price for the guilty crept into my head and forcibly turned my stomach.
“I know.” James told me, and I looked up to see my sadness reflected in him. “I can't believe it, either. But the fact is, we were given these visions for a reason. We were meant to save everyone that we can from this and start over somewhere else. We'll never be able to save them all. But we can save as many as possible, Brynna.”
I nodded, knowing, hating that he was right. I would have some choice words for a higher power as soon as my mind slowed down enough to think of them.
“Why us?” I asked, “Why were we the ones that were chosen?”
He studied me for a moment, clearly trying to decipher the answer to that question himself. All he could come up with was:
“We're lucky, I suppose.”
“Lucky by whose definition?” I asked before running my fingers through my hair. “What about supplies? This other planet is completely uninhabited, correct?”
“As far as we know.”
“So, how are we supposed to build a civilization out of nothing?”
“The ship can also hold five tons of cargo. The people who think that they're leaving have been gathering things for years.”
“I would call them such awful things. But I just cannot think of anything that is quite awful enough.” I looked at him, “James, how much time do we have?”
Once again, he fell into a lapse of silence and studied me. As the seconds ticked by so distressingly, I began to dread his answer more and more, until the feeling became so unbearable that when he opened his mouth to reply, I almost covered my ears to avoid hearing it...
“A day.”
***

As we suspected, the two jocks were still outside of my apartment building, sitting across the street on two different benches and staring at the door with expressions of pained concentration on their slowly decaying faces.
“Is there a back way in?” James asked me as the car idled.
I nodded, studying the physical deterioration of the two young men who only the night before had been so boyishly good-looking. No longer were they clean-cut and stocky. Though I knew that their height remained the same in actuality, the way they slouched cast the illusion that they had shrunk down at least three feet. Their emaciation was severe; they were merely wisps of skin clinging tightly to creaking bones. Even from across the street, I could see that their eyes were surrounded by menacing dark circles and their hair was beginning to fall from their pale-white, snake-veined scalps. To a passerby, they simply appeared to be afflicted with some terrible, fatal disease. To me, they were the perfect real-life imitations of the monsters I had run from in my childhood nightmares.
“Why do they look like that?” I whispered to James, and I did not realize how tightly my hand was squeezing his arm.
“Do you want me to sugar-coat it, or do you want me to be blunt?”
I frowned at him over my shoulder.
“What do you think?” I answered sarcastically.
“They haven't eaten you yet.”
I looked at him, my eyes bugging in fear but then quickly resuming their normal shape.
“I will let you know when I require a full explanation on that. Now is certainly not the time.”
“I wasn't going to give you one anyway.” He drove away slowly, rolling his window up before we passed them. Thank God his windows were tinted, or they surely would have seen us.
He parked the car just behind a meter. I watched him hop out with charismatic grace and had to roll my eyes; this was a gentleman who knew how good-looking and powerful he was. Arrogance never complimented a male, I had been told once by Maura, who believed herself to be the all-knowing authority on the matters of men. Shaking my head, I started to open my door only to find that he was already there, opening it for me.
“Thanks.” I murmured, “Chivalry isn't dead, I suppose.”
“No. Not to old guys like me, at least.” He replied as he walked to the meter to dispense three quarters inside of it.
“Shall we?” He beckoned towards the alley. I nodded, striding ahead of him with no fear of what might meet me. I just wanted to pack my things and go, knowing that every second ticking past was too precious to waste. We only had twenty-three hours left until the ship that would carry us far from the chaos and carnage departed our world forever.
Once safely sheltered by the shadows of the corridor, we hastened our pace until we reached the back door of my building. I took my keys from my purse and tried to steady my trembling hands long enough to unlock the door for us. I tried to tell myself that it was adrenaline causing me to tremor that way and not fear strong enough to drain what was left of my vitality. Thankfully, James reached out after a moment of watching my pathetic attempt at completing the simple task and held my hand still with both of his; together, we unlocked the door.
We moved quickly up the back stairway, jumping the steps with ease. After reaching the fourth floor, we both had to stop and breathe heavily. Damn smokers, we never learn.
“Alright, let me check,” He said, “I don't know how many of them there are. I've seen as many as ten of them casing someone's place.”
“Do you always use action movie jargon, or is this new for you?” I whispered to him in a lame attempt to make a joke. Sometimes a little humor can go a long way to ease one's anxieties.
“I always talk like this.” He whispered back, deadpan, as he looked up and down the hallway. He looked back at me and said in an intentionally hoarse voice reminiscent of a chain-smoking drill sergeant, “Coast is clear. Move out.”
I could not help but laugh softly at that. If my joke was of slightly below average hilarity, his was scraping the very bottom of the meter.
I have never been as stunned by normalcy as I was when I walked into my apartment. Everything remained exactly where I had left it: My clothes were still strewn out on the floor, my dishes were still piled in the sink, and my window was left open from when I had burned muffins the day before.
“Nice place.” James complimented me as he looked around. “How much do you pay for this?”
“Wow, nosy.” I replied before walking in further and going straight back to my bedroom.
“Not nosy. Just curious!” He called to me from the living room.
“You can come back here.” I told him as I started to pull the clothes from my drawers. I shoved them unceremoniously into my overnight bag before moving over to my closet. “So many shoes, not enough space...”
“What is it with women and shoes?” He asked me, “Why do you need a pair to go with every outfit?”
“I know. Why can't we just wear the same severely scuffed pair that we bought almost a decade ago every day?”
“Are you talking about my shoes right now?”
“I am sorry, you are allowed to call me out on my excessive footwear collection, but I am not allowed to call you out on your scant one?”
I poked my head out of the closet, raising my eyebrow in sardonic scolding, awaiting an answer.
“Touché.” He held up his hands in surrender. “But just to verify, I don't wear these every day. I wear them for work. And for your information, it was six years ago.”
I smirked and went back into my closet, quietly commanding myself not to take my stilettos, boots, or flats, but only my practical walking and running shoes. I sighed heavily again as I looked at the ones that would be left behind. I had spent so much of my parents' money on that assortment of shoes. How very sad I was to leave them all behind. I grabbed a few more items out of my closet that I could not bear to leave behind before moving past James into the bathroom.
“I do not like the silence so I will answer your nosy question.” I told him as I pulled my shampoo and conditioner out of the shower. “I don't pay for this place at all. My parents are responsible for paying my rent. They are responsible for all of my expenses, actually. Credit cards, cable and phone bills, things like that.”
“Typical rich kid, I see.”
“I didn't say I was proud of it. I just answered your question truthfully.”
“Is your relationship with your parents a good one?”
An iciness must have come over my features because he immediately backed off of the subject.
“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to.”
I nodded before answering.
“It is better that way. Let me just say this: a part of me wants to leave them behind.”
He reached out suddenly and grasped my hand, startling me with the both the suddenness of the gesture and the emotional meaning behind it.
“You have no choice but to leave them behind, sweetheart.”
Some would have considered that a bombshell. But somehow, I had already known. My parents, I am sure, knew of the impending crisis because of their jobs. My mother was a senator who was, if we are being honest, partially responsible for the predicament in which the the human race found themselves. My father ran a news organization that was no doubt hushing it all up. Guessing was not needed; I could denote easily that they had no place on the ship that would carry civilians away from the earth they had doomed.
“You don't seem surprised.” James gently prodded me to speak, to tell him in detail about the blustering war of sadness and fury inside of me. Instead, I simply posed a question to him:
“Is it because they are responsible?”
“Yes. We all voted. Every last one of us who had the vision first voted on whether or not to allow your parents to come. But since they are involved in covering this up and since they were of the many that were going to leave us all behind, we decided against it. Originally, they had all agreed that even you couldn't come. But I persuaded them.”
“Why?”
My blue eyes raised to meet his light brown ones. We gazed at each other for one long, curious moment and then he answered.
“I don't know.”
How anticlimactic. How insulting, too, that he had no idea why he had persuaded the others to save me. I would answer for him, just so the question would be closed for good, and just because I was urged to say something to fill the space of silence. Words were brimming at my lips, urging me to say them before it was too late to regret my remaining silent. If I didn't speak, I would surely meet my end much earlier than expectation dictated...
“I guess you are a good enough person that you didn't like the idea of me being eaten by those things that are just outside the door.”
The words fell from my mouth before I could fully appreciate the magnitude of what I had said or the fact that I had known those creatures had arrived at all. James looked away from me and then looked back, his own shock evident on his face.
“Alright. We have to go.” He picked up my bag and grasped my hand. “I'm going to get us out of this.”
“How?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“One more thing...” I told him before creeping out into the living room. I grabbed one of the two picture frames I had placed on the mantle over my fireplace. It was of my sisters, my brother, and me from the Christmas before, standing on either side of Maura, my “nanny.” Anyone who didn't know us or our family tree would think that she was just a proud mother surrounded by her loving children. But as it turns out, that just was not the case.
The only other picture on my spacious fire-place mantle was from a campaign event of my mother's. Someone with no knowledge of my shaky relationship with her had given the photo to me as a gift. I had kept it simply because I liked the frame and nothing else. In the photo, my mother had her arm around my back and was smiling as she waved to the crowd around her. I was still young enough not to question the perpetual charade under which we were forced to live. In the photo, I was smiling, too, and looking up at her.
That photo made me feel genuinely ill, from my chest to the pit of my stomach. As I shoved it into my other bag, I felt a wave of nausea that was so forceful, I had to reach out and grasp the mantle for a moment and focus on my breathing. It was the only way to avoid the disgusting, inevitable consequence of the tumultuous, acidic feeling in my stomach.
“What is it?” I heard him whispering to me from some far off place. I shook my head slightly, unable to explain my strange behavior away. I was unable, for the first time in a long time, to pretend that I was fine. He slung my bag onto his back and put his arm around my shoulder. As he steered me towards the open window, the feeling began to dissipate.
“The fire escape doesn't work.” I murmured to him once my stomach stopped bubbling completely.
He looked at me, instantly trying to work out a solution to our conundrum. My two ideas were useless, at least if we wished to live another day: We could jump to our deaths or get eaten by Reapers. I was well aware that they were the only two options, and for me, there was no contest between the two. James interrupted me as I silently prepared to take that first step onto the window ledge.
“I know this is going to sound insane, but I need you to just go with it.”
“After everything that has happened today, do you really think I am not going to go with it?”
“Do you have something sarcastic to say every time someone speaks?” He asked me, clearly amused and bewildered by the tendency. Most people just found it annoying.
“Indeed, I do.” I replied, and before I could add, “Thank you so much,” I heard my name being hissed on the other side of the door. My eyes must have widened and betrayed the revulsion I felt. I had never heard such a sound, and to hear it saying my name provoked a fear that froze my ability to comprehend firmly in its place. Chills ran laps up and down my spine, and the hair on my arms stood up straight. One of the creatures outside made a sound like a guttural bark followed by what sounded like my name garbled out through spit and clenched teeth.
“James…” I whispered, not realizing how tight my grip on his arm was once again, “What are we going to do?”
“Get behind the couch and close your eyes.”
“What? No, don’t open the door!” I ordered in a furious whisper. “James, please don’t. Please don’t let them in!”
To call that “begging” would be inaccurate. To call that pleading with him as though he possessed and could allot the rest of the days of my life would be closer to accuracy. But instead of hearing my desperate plea and jumping with me out of my fourth story window, he spun me around and sat me down behind the couch.
“I won’t think less of you if you cover your eyes,” He told me hurriedly, “But whatever you hear, do not come after me. Understand?”
I nodded vigorously, suddenly cognizant of the fact that I might very well witness the end of him. Given all the other complex emotions of the moment, I didn’t quite know how to process the idea of not having him by my side from then until the end. I would only understand how the thought paralyzed me much later.
My entire body jolted upwards as the door he had just thrown open banged against the stopper in the wall. I stared straight ahead, my eyes wide, my breathing shallow, but my body motionless. The first sound I heard was that short, raspy breathing of the two creatures. Next, I heard their pounding, labored footsteps.
“Come on.” James was saying, urging them to get past him, to try to come at me. “Come on!”
One long, deep, ragged inhalation followed by a shrill shriek of animal fury startled me; my hands flew to cover my ears, and my eyes squeezed tightly shut. Several hard, evenly spaced thuds vibrated the floor beneath me. I heard the bark that could have been produced by the voice of any particularly large breed of dog. After two more barks, the monsters drew in two long breaths before those blood-freezing screeches blasted from their fanged mouths again.
Several minutes had passed since the creatures had entered my apartment and still, James did not attack them nor did they charge him. They truly were searching for only me. I sensed that their stomps and roars were displays of power meant to frighten James away. I did not know why they would want to spare his life. Perhaps the Reapers only had one kill in them. Perhaps after they murdered me, they would die as well, like two bees whose prized stingers had been sacrificed in a final attack.
It didn't matter. The paths out of the trap we found ourselves in were closing, slowly becoming just thin lines over which no man or woman could pass. I couldn’t sit there with my eyes and ears covered like a skittish child awaiting whatever foul beast lurked in the darkness of her closet. James had gone out of his way already to save my life, and his chance against those things was almost nonexistent. I wasn’t going to allow him to face that ominous darkness alone just because I was afraid. Not a chance.
I jumped up and saw that James had grabbed a knife from the kitchen. Given the size difference, the sight of James staring down those two hulking masses made me think of a rabbit charging headfirst into a battle with a hungry, stomping bull, armed only with its thin, almost transparent claws.“Brynna, get back down.”
The only reason James knew that I was standing in view was because the two creatures stopped stomping and hissing and jerked their heads sideways at an unnatural angle to look at me.  As I stared into their bottomless black eyes, I could feel the wrath, terror, sorrow, and loathing of every lost soul in the history of our race. The feeling enveloped me in blackness, swallowing me whole and sending me hurtling through time and space to the place where all evil must go.
“Snap out of it! Snap out of it, Brynna!” James screamed at me, and it was hearing his voice that sent me flying back to earth and landing with a gratified thud. It was upon landing that something took over me.
That “something” was an inner beast I never knew existed, and it rivaled the real monsters in the room.
First, I hurtled over the couch. I lunged for the first beast’s throat, wrapped my arms around its meaty neck and forcefully spun so that I was behind him, tightly latched onto his back. My body was working completely at its own will, and my mind was just along for the ride. When my ears heard another deathly scream behind me, my foot swung backwards to nail the second monster quite perfectly in the center of its hideous face. It flew backwards, gasping in an almost absurd display of surprise before putting an elephant-sized dent in my newly painted wall. Beastly bastard…
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched James rush forward in a blur, raise the knife over his head, and bring it forcefully down into the gasping beast’s right eye. Another prolonged gasp and then another scream filled my ears.
My monstrous opponent sunk its several rows of razor teeth into my forearm, and instead of crying out in pain as I wanted to, I ripped my arm from its slobbering mouth. I was aware of a spray of my blood but was too focused on what I was going to do next to faint at the sight or from the pain that was beginning to burn through my body as though the blood in my veins had suddenly morphed into gasoline lit aflame.
I wrapped both of my arms around its massive head and drew in a deep breath of my own. During the seconds it took to gather such a massive inhalation, I unconsciously focused every remaining iota of strength into my locked arms. As soon as I felt the muscles swelling with fullness, I twisted, hoping to snap its neck but getting a result so much more satisfying. The beast's head spun around twice, bobbling like a top ready to topple off of its neck bone. It collapsed to the ground, face forward, and I looked up while still perched on its back. James's arm that held the knife was plunged up to his elbow in the monster's chest. My head jerked downwards, and from the way it was angled now, I could see that the knife had burgeoned out of the beast’s back. My head jerked up again as I took in the deep, wonderful, inexplicable smell of a nonexistent rain. Images of playing with my siblings in the dew-soaked grass at our family’s country estate danced in front of my mind’s eye, flooding my body with the strongest sense of euphoria I had ever experienced. That feeling is what calmed the impossibly rapid beats of my heart.
James ripped the knife out of the creature’s chest, sending a spray of black liquid in his direction that he smoothly walked sideways to avoid. The monster gave one feeble moan as it fell forward and hit my living room floor with a ground-shaking thud. That moan was not reminiscent of the animalistic sounds I had heard before, but in fact, sounded distinctly human.
I was aware that I was very slowly and slightly moving downwards. When I looked down at the beast under me, I found that it was no longer a beast, at all. Though its head was severed from its body, its face had transformed into one that was boyishly handsome once again. Its body was sculpted into the physique of a post-adolescent who spent far too much time at the gym. The monster was gone, and all that remained was the unfortunate boy from the bar. 
James was obviously experiencing a moment of joyous recollection similar to the one I had been intoxicated by earlier. He was facing the window, standing perfectly still, smelling the air deeply. After the moment had passed, he turned to see that his own adversary had transformed back into what I assumed was its true self. A sadness flashed across his eyes that I am sure he would have seen reflected in my own. I had never killed a human being, and I still had not. What I had killed was a hulking, beastly creature hell-bent on ripping me apart and devouring the pieces. I hoped that was the case, at least. I could not bear to wonder if the boy was actually human, though I certainly did know for sure that he was. He had been, anyway, at one time.
When James's eyes finally met mine, I was stunned to find that they had turned over to a milky bluish-white, giving him the appearance of being blind.
“James…” I whispered in a trembling voice.
“Go look in the mirror.”
I jumped up and hurried to my dining room where a wall length mirror hung beside the sliding glass door. What I saw made my heart leap tremendously forward as a curiosity unrivaled by anything I had ever felt took hold of me. My own eyes were the color of blindness, of death. I became aware that I could see every pore on my face and every color around me down to its basis of black. I could see every different follicle of hair on my arms, every different shade of color in my irises that were still visible just behind the blue and white.
I walked to the sliding doors, pulled them open, and walked out onto my balcony where the magnificently colored lights of dawn were beginning to descend on a city so intricately designed, so infinite and unending, that it surely could not have been my own. When I felt James reach his place by my side, we stared in silence at this dying world, seeing it clearly in all its intended but failed goodness for the very first, and very last, time.
We were both covered in the black substance that flowed through the bodies of those creatures that laid dead on my living room floor. That strange nostalgia was still cradling me, and I could hear the blood droplets that were seeping from the gaping wound in my arm exploding against the pavement in front of our feet as clearly as I could hear the summer rain against the greenhouse roof of my parent’s estate all those years ago. Despite the severity of the injury, I felt no pain. I slid my injured arm around James’s back, feeling a brilliantly comforting onslaught of warmth spread through me as his own draped over my shoulders.
Words I never believed would be spoken by me fell from my lips before I could understand how sadly profound they were:
“I will miss this world.”
He didn’t break his gaze from the fantastical realm that was our earth in its true form when he replied softly:
“I will, too.”

Quinn

Alice was starting to lose it. We had been running from that thing for too long. I can’t think of any other way to describe it but by calling it a “thing.” It definitely wasn't human.
Were we still human then?
I won’t spend time re-telling all the conversations we had on the subject. We spent hours trying to decipher the situation and still, we couldn't make sense of it. We would sit behind our barred bedroom door, draw the shades as soon as we saw the darkness of night beginning to come our way, and brace for its awful presence.
I had never been brave enough to open the shades to see her again after the first time. I had never been brave enough to face her. But was Alice? I think so. She had always been braver than me. I was her boyfriend who was supposed to protect her with no thought of my own safety. If I were to die for her, it wouldn’t prove my bravery. It would only prove that I had done one of my duties. She was genuinely fearless and always had been.
The first time the thing appeared, we had only gotten out of school for Christmas break two days earlier. Her parents had gone out of town (which couldn’t have been stupider, given that we were newly on break and looking to party), leaving us to our own devices in their modest house. The second semester was over, our down-time had arrived, and we were free of homework, our parents, and the restraints both had put on us.
Our parents are a story for another time.
While all of our friends were hunkering down together in the basements of their houses for a week of drinking and the stupidity said drinking would certainly incite, we decided to hang for the duration of her parent’s vacation at her house. Our high school friends found us dull once we decided to date, and we didn’t feel we had much in common with them after that, anyway. Her parents told her that I was by no means allowed in the house, not even to thwart a burglary, which was one of the scenarios she had presented to them sarcastically.
We spent those first two days of independence streaming stupid 80’s movies, going out at two in the morning just because we could, and eating all of the food in her house. Not exactly the badass rebellion that people might have expected two teenagers free from their parents to get up to, but that’s really all we did. 
“They’ll know you were here.” She told me one hot afternoon, “They’ll know that I couldn’t have eaten all of this food by myself.”
“Oh, just tell them you smoked a bunch of weed and got the munchies. They’ll take that, as long as I wasn’t here.”
“Smoking weed with me.”
“No, not even. As long as I wasn’t here at all.”
We spent time talking about how we had gotten together and how much our parents hated our relationship. I guess that is where our rebellious streaks came in, because we found their protests to our love thrilling. We talked about how we had been friends for so long and how the feelings had changed. I told her that it took years for me to realize that I loved her in a different way than the way I would love a girl who was only my friend. She went further than that, telling me she had loved me that way all along.
I still get a weird feeling of intense happiness and also, bewilderment, when I think about her telling me that. It’s one of those moments that I hold onto these days, when things get too dark to see straight anymore.
We had both just dropped off to sleep on the second night when a loud scratching sound jerked us both awake. I sat up, thinking that someone was trying to break in; she had jinxed it when she had suggested the possibility to her parents in derision.
“What is that?” She whispered to me, her doe-like brown eyes appearing strangely contorted in the darkness.
The scratching sounded again, and we both looked at the window. Whatever was just behind the closed blinds was running its claws down the windowpane. Somehow, I knew that it wasn’t normal. I knew that it was not of our world. But our minds tend to rationalize, to keep us grounded in reality when we should be bracing to face the unusual.
“Quinn, what is that?” She whispered again, and when I stood up, she jumped up, too. Her small hands wrapped around my upper arms and squeezed so tightly that my fingertips began to tingle within seconds.
“I don’t know.” I tried to keep my voice steady for her sake. “I’m going to open the shades and see. Maybe it’s a…” I stopped, searching for a plausible explanation, “…squirrel.”
Yeah. I thought that was plausible.
“That’s not a squirrel!” She gripped my arm even tighter to stop me from walking forward, and I winced.
“I have to see what it is.” I told her, “I'm sure it's nothing, babe.”
“No. Quinn, please don’t open the shades. Don’t…” She stopped and looked up at me again, tears glistening in her eyes, “Don’t let her in.”
I looked at her, seeing a look of shock on her face that I’m sure mirrored my own. How had she known that it was a woman?
“Close your eyes.” I whispered to her before turning back to the window.
How had I known to say that?
There were several galloping footsteps, like something heavy running on all fours. Whatever it was stopped in front of her other bedroom window.
It was a warmer night than what we were used to for that time of year with the temperature hovering in the mid-forties instead of deep down in the twenties. Alice had cranked the heat up too high, thinking that eighty degrees was only going to be balmy, so we had turned the thermostat back down and opened the windows in her bedroom. When we heard soft, slow breathing outside of one of the wide open windows, we both ran forward to slam it shut, knowing now that it was a person outside trying to force their way in. We both stopped, though, when we saw the shade blowing towards us and then retracting with each slow breath the mysterious thing took. We looked at the other window to see if the shade covering it was moving the same way; that would prove that the wind was to blame and our imaginations were running away with us. But we got no such relief because the other shade was as still as the sudden silence outside of the window.
Just as we began to calm down, believing whoever it was had gotten bored and moved on to another house, we heard it speak.
“I… smell… you…”
Alice gasped and grabbed the phone to try dialing 911.
“Quinn, it’s not working!”
But I was in a trance. At the same time my mind was screaming at me, begging not to see what was out there, my body continued forward, moving at the accord of the tiny part of me that needed to see, that still believed that we were imagining it all. Or was it just a need to see whatever grotesque creature was out there? I still don't know.
How did I know it was grotesque?
My legs were resisting now, refusing to move me forward, but I was already close enough to reach the shade on the window. I reached out, just needing the relief of knowing that it wasn’t real, that we were in a waking dream. I needed the relief that came with realizing a bump in the night was just a neighbor slamming a door in his house. With my breath held tightly in my chest, I threw open the shade.
It was a woman. But it certainly wasn’t human. Her eyes were too large and all white, with thin flecks of black like someone had sliced at them with a sewing needle or erased her iris and pupil in a hurry, I couldn’t decide. Her hair was long and as white as her eyes and her jaw jutted outwards at an impossible angle. When she opened her misshapen slash of a mouth for every slow, tedious breath, she immediately snapped it shut and ground her pointed teeth together.
As soon as she saw me, she raised her arms, shrieking in rage, her head shaking back and forth quickly. She slammed her hands on the window hard, trying to break the glass. Even as an icy fear seized me, I did take a moment to marvel at the fact that the force she hit the window with didn’t shatter it into pieces. A gargling noise was coming from that slash I knew now was her mouth, followed by another loud shriek that forced Alice to finally uncover her eyes and look.
Alice drew in a gasp and before the words, “Don’t let her scream” could pass completely through my mind, I turned backwards and grabbed a hold of her, trying to cover her mouth. But she had already covered it with both of her own hands, forcing the scream back down.
I let go of her and rushed forward, pulling the shade down again. As I stumbled backwards to put as much space between me and the window as I could, I tripped over my feet and splayed out onto the floor. Alice knelt down beside me and wrapped her arms around my neck, staring at the window with wide, alarmed eyes. I looked at her and then back at the window where we heard the thing grunt in frustration and then go silent.
“What is that? Quinn…” She whispered, her voice trembling along with her body.
I shook my head, feeling as though my heart was lodged in my throat, blocking any words that I could possibly say to explain away what we had seen.
We sat up for the rest of the night. I had to be driving her crazy with the way I was opening my mouth to say something that would rationalize what was happening, only to come up short on words. The thing stayed out there all night; though it never spoke again, we heard its steady breaths until the first light of dawn began to break. As soon as I could see light starting to leak through the crack between the shade and the window, I jumped to look outside.
She was gone, galloping over our heads on the roof away from the rising sun. An ear-splitting howl wrecked the quiet of the early morning, and I scanned the houses across the street to see if anyone came running, searching feverishly for the source of such a strange noise. No one came, nor did I even see any curious faces appearing in the windows.
Because no one knew she had been there, no one would know why she had been there. Alice and I were, horrifyingly, alone in the mess, left to decipher it by ourselves before cleaning it up, if we ever could.
It took precisely an hour of daylight before we began to excuse away what had happened.
“Maybe it was like one of those group hallucinations that Dr. Meyers was telling us about in AP Psych. Do you remember?”
“A group hallucination? Caused by what, exactly?” She asked as she twirled the glass of orange juice on the table in front of her but never brought it to her lips for a drink.
“I don’t know. Maybe there was something in our food last night.”
“I don’t remember reading anything about Burger King suddenly adding LSD to their onion rings, Quinn.”
“Do you have an explanation, then?” I was frustrated now. I just needed to know that what we had seen wasn’t real. I needed to believe that. If that thing was real, then the world as we knew it didn’t make sense anymore, and that was more dangerous than I could fully understand at that young age.
“I do, actually.” She told me, “It was probably one of your stupid friends.”
“They’re all over at Mia’s house! Remember, they said something about having burgers! Or not having burgers! I don’t know; I think Mia was stoned as hell when she was talking to me.”
“Probably, but I was supposed to chat with her last night, and she didn’t get online.”
“Just because they’re too drunk or high to pick up the phone doesn’t mean that they’re going to come over here and try to freak us out, Allie.”
“Actually, I think both of those things are the perfect reason why they would come over here to try to freak us out. They probably went to the new Halloween store and got a mask. You know it’s open all year round now.”
“Do you really think that they would sit out there all night? And what about those noises?”
“What noises?”
“The noises it was making! I know you heard it! That’s why you covered your ears all night.”
“I don’t remember any noises.”
I looked up at her to find that she was staring out the window, making a point of avoiding my eyes. I had known her long enough to know that meant she was lying.
I downed what was left in my coffee mug before pouring myself a fourth cup. I looked at the clock on the canary yellow wall of her kitchen; it was 9:35 AM, and we had been downstairs for an hour. Drinking three cups of coffee during that time definitely didn’t help settle my nerves.
“Allie, I know you’re freaked out. I am, too. But there is no way that thing was any of our friends pranking us.”
“Maybe it was a neighbor kid, then. There are these stupid kids who live up the street from here who always ding-dong-ditch the house.”
“People still do that?” I asked in disbelief. I shook my head slightly to get my mind back on topic. “It wasn’t anyone playing a prank. It was either a hallucination or…”
“Or what?” She asked, looking at me now. “Or what, Quinn?”
We were both quiet, not knowing exactly how to answer the question I had asked. Neither of us wanted to. We didn’t want to face the truth. Who could blame us for that after what we had seen?
“You’ll stay here with me tonight, won’t you? I can’t stay here alone.” She told me, and the fear I had seen in her the night before resurfaced for a quick second.
“Duh.” I replied, and I saw the faintest trace of a smile on her face. “All we can do now is just see if it comes back. If it does, we’ll handle it.”
“How?”
I looked at her and shrugged slightly.
“I don't know. But I'm working on it.”
***

We sat up with the blinds closed, dreading the moment when night fell, though we never said that out loud. I tried to remain as optimistic as I could when I knew down to my core that we would be seeing our freakish visitor again. Alice shook her head every time I tried to say that we wouldn’t until finally I stopped speaking all together, realizing that she didn’t need me or anyone else to lie for her sake.
As we sat in silence on her bed, my mind traveled back to when we first decided to go from being friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Immediately, her mother and father objected, saying that it didn’t matter how far we had come as a society, we would still face the same barriers and prejudice interracial couples had always faced. Alice was young and naïve, they said, if she believed otherwise. But she was stubborn and so sure of the fact that we were meant to be. She didn’t hesitate to tell her parents that she saw herself ending up with me.
Young and naïve, they said again. Even if it weren’t an issue of me being black and her being white, the chances of us staying together for the rest of our lives or even through college were slim to none.
My parents were a little gentler about the whole thing, retelling all the stories they had been told by their friends who had married outside of their own race.
“Do you all have any idea what year it is?!” I had exclaimed furiously. “We’re past this! You claim society is going to object, but it’s just you! It’s just you and her parents! I’m surprised the four of you don’t get along better given the fact that your beliefs are exactly the same. Besides, we don’t even live in the south!”
They had tried to say that down in the southern states, we would face the worst of it.
“Good thing we’re not planning on moving to Texas, then, right?” I had laughed at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. They were out of touc,h and they just didn’t like her, for no reason I could pin down in certainty.
“Besides, Quinn, you shouldn’t be asking us if we know what year it is. You should be asking the people who will give you a problem over this.” My dad had reasoned, “It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it is reality. You understand that, don’t you?”
“It’s not reality! You two and her parents have no idea what you’re talking about! And it doesn’t matter what you say, okay? We’re going to be together.”
A teenage boy proclaiming his undying love for his girlfriend with all the naivety and idealism in the world is hardly front page news. Our parents projecting a completely ridiculous notion of racial prejudice to keep us apart was hardly a new tactic of division. But the situation we found ourselves in that night was so out of the ordinary that to tell anyone about it would surely have guaranteed our swift departure to separate mental hospitals.
“I just don’t want to see it again, okay?” Alice whispered to me, and I looked up at her, seeing the darkness reflected on her face now instead of the fading streak of light I had seen before. We both turned our heads to the window.
“I don’t think it’s out there.”
I stood up to go look, but she grabbed my arm.
“Quinn!” She exclaimed, “Just keep the blinds closed. Please?”
I nodded, and we sat back down, waiting for any sign of its presence, be it a scratch, a heavy breath, or its blood-chilling voice.
“We’re being so stupid.” I told her as I laid on her bed staring up at the ceiling. The sun had gone down two hours earlier.
“Do you think so? Do you think it really was just a stupid kid in the neighborhood?” She asked, her eyes moving between me and the window.
“Or it was a group hallucination.” I replied, grinning.
“Shut up! It was not a group hallucination!” She laughed and smacked me with a pillow.
“It was. You’re just in denial.”
“I am not in denial. Let’s just go to sleep.” She told me, still smiling. “It’s freaking hot in here. I’m opening the window.”
“Yeah, it’s hot because some people don’t know how to use thermostats.”
“Shut up!”
She grabbed the blinds and pulled them down slightly so that they flung up.
We both gasped, her covering her mouth to prevent the scream that rose quickly in her throat.
The thing was outside again, staring in at us with the faintest trace of a smile on its contorted mouth.
It was playing with us.
***

She buckled after that second night. She tried to call her mom and dad. When we’re afraid as children, the only people that can calm the fear are our parents. Alice was grasping at that straw, thinking that if they came home, the creature would be frightened away.
“My dad will shoot it if it tries to get in, Quinn! They’ll protect us both!”
Somehow, I doubted that they would be willing to lay down their lives for me. My parents liked Alice as a person but did not approve of us as a couple. Her parents felt exactly the same way. That level of affection was minimal, to say the least. They would not protect me.
She paced around the kitchen floor with the phone pressed to her ear.
“They’re far out in the ocean, Allie. There’s no cell service out there.” I explained to her after she slammed the phone down hard on its charger. She pressed her face into her shaking hands before running her fingers through her hair.
“I need them to answer.” She told me uselessly. “I think they can check email on the ship. Come on!”
After hurrying into the dining room where the desktop was set up, she began to furiously type out a message.
“Are you going to tell them exactly what’s going on?” I asked.
“Of course not. They won’t believe it. I’m just telling them to call me as soon as they get the message. Then, I’ll tell them everything. I’ll tell them that as soon as they reach the port in Bermuda, they have to get on a plane and come home.”
“I don’t think they’ll believe us either way. They’ll think that we’re messing with them. Then they’re going to be really pissed off.”
“When they hear my voice, they’ll know I’m not messing with them. They’ll know that this is serious. Quinn, we can’t do this by ourselves. I know that if we can just get them here, that thing will leave us alone. Have you talked to your parents?”
I had, but I hadn’t mentioned anything about our current issue to them. I knew that they wouldn’t believe me just as I knew that Alice’s parents wouldn’t believe her. My parents were home and could offer help immediately. But there was no way that I would be able to convince them. Imagine the story: Every night, we were being stalked by a hideous, otherworldly creature that sat outside of our window, watching us until the sun rose. Then, it ran over the roof and disappeared, hiding out until the sun went down again. I certainly wouldn’t believe a word of that story if it was told to me.
“They won’t believe me.”
“You have to try, Quinn! You have to make them believe you!”
“Alice, would you believe us? This is something straight out of a horror movie. They’re going to think that we’re here alone every night and letting our imaginations run away with us. Either that or they’re going to think we’re smoking a lot of weed! Or taking lots of pills!”
“My parents will believe me.”
“That’s great for you. Really, it is. I have to tell you, though, that I don’t believe that. I don’t think they’ll believe any of this.”
“Well, we’ll see about that. As soon as they hear how afraid I am, they’ll be on the first plane home. And my dad will kill it!”
“I think your mom will kill it. She’s way scarier than your dad.”
“Maybe she will! One of them will show it how wrong it was to come around here. I know it, Quinn. I know it.”
We waited, both struggling to hold onto the belief that they would believe us and be able to help. We struggled to continue thinking that everything would be alright when they came home. We prayed that they would be able to save us.
The email went unanswered and the phone never rang.
***

It wasn’t until the third night that Alice finally broke. She cried with her face against my chest from the time the thing appeared (this time, we had kept the shades open, trying to see how exactly it appeared, only to look up and find it staring down at us from the roof) to the time that the sun came up.
“What does it want? We have to try to talk to it. We have to figure out what it’s doing here, Quinn!” She exclaimed at me in a perfect show of misguided frustration.
We had gone two and a half days without sleep. Every time we dropped off, the thing’s horrific face would pop into our minds and we’d both immediately sit up in bed, regardless of the hour in the day.
“No. We need to ignore it. You remember that movie we saw a couple years ago? They said that with anything paranormal, if you address it, it only gets worse. If you feed into it, you give it power. We just have to ignore it.”
“Ignore it?!” She screamed at me, “How are we supposed to ignore it?!”
“It hasn’t done anything to try to hurt us…”
“Besides trying to break the window on the first night! What’s stopping it from breaking in here and… who knows, Quinn?! Do you know?!”
“How would I know, Allie? What, you think I have some sort of connection to it?”
“It’s always looking at you. It’s always looking directly at you! It’s never looked at me the way it looks at you!”
“Are you really happy about that?! Are you really happy that it wants me?! And it has totally looked at you!”
“Did not! It smiled at you night before last!”
“It was smiling at both of us because it knew that we had really thought it was gone!”
“See! You do know what it’s thinking!”
“I’m just guessing!”
“Well, maybe you should just go. Maybe you should go home, and we can see whose house it shows up at. Then we’ll know who it’s after!”
“And then what?” I asked her, bringing my voice back to normal.
She stared at me, her eyes hostile now. She didn’t answer, but I knew: If it was after me, she was saved. If it was after me, she’d be relieved. She’d rather me suffer whatever that thing had in store for us alone than for us to face it together.
I was young and idealistic, as my parents said. I would have done anything to protect her, and if that meant dying in her place, then so be it. How could that feeling have been one-sided? How could she not have wanted to reciprocate such selflessness? The short answer is that her mind was on par with her physical age; she was a self-interested teenage girl terrified to die before she could live. I will explain the long answer later.
“Fine. Face it on your own, then.” I muttered, stung by her words and what they meant for us.
I was ridiculously melodramatic in those days. I stormed out, vowing never to go back. If I had been half as smart as I thought I was, I would have stayed. For the rest of my life, I will carry the fact that what happened next was my fault.
***

There was an ear-splitting whistling that caused me to fall to the ground, covering my ears. I looked up to see others crumpling around me. After several painful moments, my ears were soothed with an ethereal silence; it was like the calm before the storm. Then came the blast. For a second that was too short, I saw the wave of fire coming towards me. As it consumed me, my entire body burnt, and I saw clearly my flesh being blasted from my bones…
I awoke, yelling out and slashing my arms in the air to hold off what I knew could never be stopped. My entire body was dripping sweat, and I wiped at it furiously with trembling hands.
It had been so real. There had been no other reality, just the one where I met my death. Unlike when we first saw the creature outside the window, I couldn’t rationalize the dream away. It was real and it would happen. But when?
I didn’t know.
My phone rang about ten minutes later, some obnoxious ring-tone that I can’t remember. I looked at the caller ID to see Alice’s name.
“What?” I asked abruptly, rubbing my eyes.
All I heard were her breathy sobs on the other end of the phone and immediately, an alertness came over me that shook all thoughts of the most horrifying nightmare I had ever had from my head.
“Allie, what’s going on? Is it back?” I didn’t wait for her answer; I was already pulling my shoes on.
She continued crying for a moment.
“Alice!” I exclaimed, climbing out of my window with my car keys in hand.
“Quinn…” She whispered in a trembling voice, “I let it in!”
***

I sped to her house with absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I got there. My tires squealed around every turn, and I blazed through every yellow light I came to. On the one red light that I was unfortunate enough to catch, my legs were shaking up and down the entire time, and I’m pretty sure that I was bobbing in my seat a little, too. Anyone who saw me would have assumed I was probably just racing home to use the bathroom. Little did they know I was actually zooming to my girlfriend's house where I would more than likely be killed by a demonic creature that had been stalking us for a week...
I watched the light that was green for the other direction of traffic turn to yellow and slammed the gas, swerving to avoid a car that had been trying to make it through before the light turned red. The flash of the traffic camera made images from the dream run through my mind; I wouldn't have to worry about ever paying that ticket...
As soon as I reached her house, I put the car into Park and pulled the keys out of the ignition, running to the trellis thing I always climbed up to get to her room. But my eyes found her front door instead of looking up to climb. It was open completely.
I ran forward, ducking down so that if the thing was watching, it couldn’t see me. But something told me that it knew I was there. It was waiting for me to come into the house, too.
Despite believing that, I walked inside, staying down low, listening for any sound, even the smallest, that might tell me where the thing was. I wanted to whisper Alice’s name but knew that it was too risky. So instead, I let my feet carry me and found that they seemed to know exactly where to go.
I was walking down the basement steps, hearing the soft breathing now in the distance.
“Alice?” The woman’s voice hissed in the darkness ahead of me, “Alice?”
“Get to Alice.” My mind demanded, and instantly, I picked up her familiar scent of coconut shampoo. She was close; if I kept walking, I’d probably trip over her. I had to chance saying her name. I had no other way to find her.
“Alice?” I whispered, my voice so low that there was no way she could have heard. But I felt her small hand reach out and grasp mine. In an abrupt jerk, she pulled me down to the floor. I closed my eyes, picturing the layout of her basement, where we always hung out. I knew that we were now crouched down below her mother’s old computer desk.
“Quinn, she’s close.” She whispered with her mouth right up against my ear.
“How did she get in?” I breathed back as my eyes widened by their own accord, trying to see her.
“Shh!” She shushed me, and suddenly, she came into view.
I could see in perfect darkness.
“Holy shit, I can see you!”
She nodded but said nothing. We both looked simultaneously to our right, where we could see the creature pawing the ground soundlessly.
“What is it doing?” I mouthed to her, and she shrugged, shaking her head slightly as she watched it with terrified eyes.
“Where?!” The creature exclaimed suddenly, causing us both to jump.
“She can’t see us. Or hear…” I mouthed to her, and she nodded again.
“We have to hit her with something!” Alice mimed the gesture as she said the word before crawling out from under the desk and moving quickly to the fireplace at the end of the room. Her father hid his shotgun in a secret compartment under the ledge that their family pictures were currently decorating. I rolled out from under the desk to help her move the pictures silently and quickly. Our eyes never moved from the creature that was now stomping the ground and jerking around the open space with its arms outstretched.
Alice opened the shelf silently and took out the shotgun. She pulled it open, checking to make sure it was loaded before carefully snapping it back together. She had always been the more outdoorsy one out of the two of us; her dad took her shooting at the gun range in the next town over almost every weekend. If we stacked our experience with firearms side by side, she trumped me every time. I had never even held a gun.
She aimed expertly and whistled for good measure. The creature’s head jerked up, looking in our direction now. It hissed, its already hideous face contorting to a new, horrifying sneer; it was the face of a hunter cornering its prey. But Alice raised the gun, the fear she had felt for days vanished completely from her eyes. Without hesitation, she fired one shell right into the monster's bony chest.
It was thrown backwards before it could even shriek in protest. It landed, twitching and spewing frothy spit from its mouth. I put my arm around her, pushing the shotgun down before she fired it again. She looked at me, nodding slightly, still saying nothing.
“Well, I think we killed it.”
“I don’t think it’s dead.” She replied, walking forward. “I can’t see anymore. Can you switch on the lights?”
I couldn’t see in the dark anymore, either, so I had to feel my way along the wall to the light switch. When I clicked it on, she was delicately placing the shotgun back in the compartment above the fireplace. We walked back to the creature hand in hand.
It looked different; its body had filled out to the shape of a healthy person instead of a fully decayed corpse. Its hair was no longer white and long but cut short and matted to what remained of its blood-soaked head. And when I flipped the thing over onto its back, I stumbled away in horror. Beyond horror…
A scream erupted behind me. It was a scream of terror and grief that consumed her instantaneously. It was the scream she had kept forced down deep inside of her since the moment that thing had arrived.
We were looking at her mother.
***

The problem with living in a neighborhood where houses are practically built right on top of each other is that the smallest disturbance, the smallest suggestion of something being out of the ordinary, alerts everyone. I don't think that Alice's neighbors would have seen the creature even if they stared right at the house while it was outside. I know they didn't hear the loud, screeching noises that she made every night. But they did hear the blast of the shotgun. As I held Alice, trying to calm her down, I heard a knock on the door upstairs.
“Oh my God… oh my God…” Alice was crying.
“Babe, there’s someone at the door.” I told her softly, and she pulled away from me, looking even more distressed.
“Do you think...” She hiccupped as new sobs took hold of her. “Do you think it’s my dad? Do you think he’s one of those things, too?”
“I don’t know. Just stay here.” I instructed her urgently, “I’ll be right back.”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She exclaimed, jumping up and grabbing my hand, “Don’t leave me with her!”
“Alice, you have to stay here. Just for a minute. I have to get this person to go away. Just stay here. I’ll be five minutes. I promise.”
She nodded but sat by the door, her back to the body.
I sprinted upstairs, ready to fight another one of those horrible things. Alice’s words hung in my head like a bad song I couldn’t shake; what if her dad was one of them, too?
“Open up! Police!” A thunderous voice boomed from behind the front door.
Just as I was thanking God for the sudden arrival of the police, I suddenly remembered the obliterated body downstairs on the floor who just happened to be the estranged mother of my girlfriend. Surely, two teenagers at home alone with the body of the woman who had so protested their relationship left little room to speculate on motive. I watched enough CSI and Criminal Minds to know that.
Curse words flew through my head as a cold sweat broke over me. How was I going to get rid of a cop? What if he wanted to search the house? Even if I didn't know how exactly, I had to make him leave. I just had to tell him everything was fine, and he’d go.
I threw open the door before I could wonder what I was going to say any longer. If I needed to appear surprised at something, I couldn’t afford to stand and think about all the answers I was going to give to the cop’s questions. I watched enough Dexter to know how to play it cool and collected.
“Hi, Officer.”
I had to stop myself from grimacing; no kid greets a cop like that! “I didn’t do anything!” would have probably been a more realistic greeting. Of course, it also would have raised more suspicion than it would have remedied.
“Hello.” He replied formally, “Sorry to bother you, but neighbors reported hearing a weapon discharged here. Is this your house?”
“No. This is my girlfriend’s house.”
“Are her parents home?”
I prayed the sweat that was pouring from me wasn’t noticeable. Nothing was more telling than someone who appeared nervous.
“No.” I replied, shaking my head slightly and crossing my arms over my chest. I even leaned on the door-frame, trying to appear completely relaxed. “They’re on vacation in Bermuda.”
“Where is your girlfriend?”
“Sleeping.” I answered automatically, “And no weapons discharged. Maybe it was a car backfiring or something.”
Too much, I thought to myself and shut up.
“They said it sounded like a shotgun.”
“Oh.”
“I think I should come in and have a look around.”
“Why?” I asked, panicking only internally. On the surface, I was still composed, thankfully. “We’re just chilling. We didn’t do anything. Alice is asleep, and I was, too, before you knocked.”
“Would you wake her up and tell her to come down, just so I can make sure she’s okay?”
“No. She’s been…” I was scrambling for an excuse, anything to keep him from coming into the house. Alice was a wreck; she had been crying for half an hour and more than likely had blood splattered on her. There was no way we’d be getting out of the situation if he saw her. “She’s been really stressed out today because she’s not used to her parents being gone and she just went to sleep.”
“That’s why you’re here?”
“I guess so.”
“Because her parents aren’t here?”
“Yeah. She doesn’t like to be alone.”
“Plus, I’m sure you’re both just thrilled to have the house to yourselves, right?”
My eyebrows almost met in the middle in a comical expression of disbelief at what he said. I won't lie and say that I didn't take it the wrong way. The half-smile at the corner of his mouth didn't help to dispel my belief that he had just suggested something with an obscene undertone.
 Still, I was calm.
“I guess so.”
“Well, just so I can feel I did my job, I’m going to need you to call your girlfriend downstairs.”
More curse words exploded in my mind and came quite close to pouring out of my mouth. I knew he was only doing his job, but given the circumstances, I just couldn’t afford to play nice with him. I couldn’t let him come into the house. So as my anger and frustration mounted, and my need to get Alice and me safely out of the bizarre mess we were in became as real and as crucial as thirst and hunger, I snapped.
“Leave!” I barked at the cop, and my eyes widened in horror. I couldn’t believe that I had actually said it. We were so screwed now, everything was lost, we were going to jail for killing Alice’s mom...
“But we didn’t know it was Alice’s mom, Officer. We thought it was a ghastly female demon creature!” Yeah, that would work…
But the cop, as though I had in one word absolved his need to do his job to high standards, turned and walked away, muttering a quick, “Have a good night,” over his shoulder.
There was something hypnotized in his eyes and lighter in his step as he walked away.
“I just controlled his mind.” I muttered to myself before turning around and running back downstairs into the basement, calling Alice’s name as I went.
“I can’t believe I killed her… oh my God…” She was whispering to herself and sitting with her legs pulled into her chest and her face pressed into her knees.
“Alice, you will never believe what just happened.”
“Where do you think my dad is? Do you think he’s one of them, too? Do you think he got turned into whatever they are, Quinn?” She asked, looking up at me with tears streaming down her cheeks.
I knelt down in front of her, all trace of my thrill from a second earlier gone.
“I don’t know.” I told her, grasping her hands, “But I can tell you that something weird is happening here. I had this dream. It was so real. I can’t even describe to you how real it was. I know that it’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen soon.”
“What is?” She asked me as she swiped at her eyes.
“The world is going to end.”
I expected her to protest and to tell me that I had lost it, but she didn’t. Her face remained impassive as she stared past me into the room where her mother’s body still laid.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now that I know that. And I do know it, Alice.”
“Do you know when?” She asked me quietly, still not looking at me, “Is it soon?”
“Yes. I do know that it’s going to be soon. And that was a cop at the door, by the way. I controlled his mind.”
“How?”
“I have no idea.” I replied, “But that doesn’t matter. The point is, he’s gone, and we’re going to be okay.”
“We’re going to be okay even though the world is ending soon?” She asked, her large brown eyes meeting mine finally.
“Yes. I know that I had that dream for a reason. I know that it means that I’m supposed to do something about it.”
“You seem to know a lot of things, Quinn. I don’t know anything anymore.” She put her face in her hands and started to cry again. I didn’t know how to comfort her. I had never seen her cry before and now, when I finally did, there was nothing I could say. I think I would have been able to console her if the situation that caused her to feel such sadness had revolved around normal adolescent angst. But the issue we were facing was something else entirely.
I embraced her and told her again that everything was going to be alright. I told her we would survive the hell we were going through somehow. I told her we would survive the impending end of the world and figure out a way to live after all life had ended.
The things I said I knew, I did know. But those promises I made to her were empty and halfhearted; I had not even a semblance of the clarity I had about the other things when I tried to picture ways that we would outlive the end of the world. I was offering her the only reassurances that I could, knowing that not one of them truly mattered. I knew very little else besides the few details of that one, terrifying event that was coming quickly into clear view.
When I tell this story to survivors, I always say that the uncertainty and mental dimness that followed my prophetic moment were worse than the actual moment.
To put it poetically, it was like I was tumbling from a brightly lit, spacious room where all was laid out before me in perfect clearness, into a dark, claustrophobic space, where I could see nothing. All I could do was grasp around helplessly for the light that had just thrown me away.
***

“I am trying to be delicate about this, baby, but I know that we’re running out of time. We don’t have any time to look for him.”
“He’s my father, Quinn! I already killed my mom, for God’s sake! You won’t at least give me a day to look for my dad?!” She shouted in fury as I threw her clothes into her suitcase.
“We still have to go to my house and pack some things. I still have to say goodbye to my parents.”
“You’re just going to leave your parents?! You don’t even care?!”
“Of course I care! It’s just…” I trailed off, unsure of where my apathy was coming from. I had always had a good relationship with my parents until recently, when we had begun to spar over mine and Alice’s romance.
“It's just what, Quinn?!”
“I know there’s nothing I can do for them. If I try to tell them about this, they’re going to… I don’t know… interfere! They’re going to tell you to go home, and then they’re going to try to lock me up until they can arrange to have me put away somewhere. They will never believe this, not even if I beg them to. I know it seems like I’m the worst person in the world for being so ready to leave them, but we have to get out of here. They’ll stop us from doing that.”
“But they’re you’re parents, Quinn.”
“I know.” I sat down, feeling a lump form in my throat that I immediately tried to diminish by taking a drink of water. “I know, Allie.”
We were quiet for a long time, and I swiped at the tears that had formed in my eyes every time she looked away from me. Finally, after that long minute of heavy silence, she spoke again.
“You can’t leave them.”
“But I can’t tell them what’s happening. They’ll stop us, and then we’ll die. We’re running out of time, Alice. Look at this.”
I handed her the papers I had printed from a discussion forum I had found online. I joined the forum to add my own two cents, telling the other posters (from many different countries, I might add) that I had the same dream, on the same night, down to the very same details.
“What is this?”
“That dream I had… Other people had it, too. We need to go meet them.”
“We don’t even know them! They could be crazy people, Quinn! What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is the fact that we’re running out of time before the world explodes, Alice!” I snapped at her and instantly regretted it. She pulled her knees close to her chest and put her face against them, crying again. I knelt down beside her and tried my best to apologize, but she wanted no parts of it, at least not then.
“We just have to go, Allie. I know how hard it is for you. It’s hard for both of us…”
“What are you going to say to your parents?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they already know, and they’ll come with us. But I know I won’t be able to convince them, so I’m not even going to try. They already think I’m rebelling against them and now they’re just going to think that I’ve lost it, too. So, I guess I’ll say that I love them, and I’ll try to make it seem like it’s no big deal that I’m saying it.” 
I was silent for a minute, picturing saying goodbye to them for the very last time. The finality of it stole my breath more painfully than a swift kick to my stomach could. I loved them as most sons love their parents. I had always wanted their approval and accepted their praise and even criticism until I met Alice. After they objected to her, I couldn’t accept anything from them anymore. It was so foolish of me. It was so childish. They were wrong about her, but that should not have shifted my feelings towards them as dramatically as it did.
I knew that I had to lie to them. I knew that I had to pretend that we would be back soon, even though after the dream I had, I knew that they wouldn’t be alive after that cataclysmic event occurred.
“So, you’re just going to say ‘I love you,’ pack up a bag, and walk out the door?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I don’t think I have a choice, Allie. I know I don’t.”
“You idiot.” Her hands grasped my face, and she turned my head with painful abruptness so I was looking at her. “You do have a choice. Well, actually, you don’t. Because if you think that I am going to let you leave without at least trying to convince them to come with us, you are out of your freaking mind. So, you’re going to try, and I’m going to help you. And together, we’re going to convince them. And I know that we can.” 
***

The memory I have of us leaving her house for the last time is as clear to me still as it was the day it happened. I remember how she insisted on locking the door and how I knew that she was just trying to preserve the smallest bit of normalcy by doing so. I remember how we walked hand in hand down her driveway to my car that was still parked crookedly next to the curb. I remember how she looked back, tears streaming from her eyes, at the house she had grown up in. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling but I would be able to feel it in reality with no imagining necessary soon enough when I said goodbye to my parents. Even though Alice was convinced that we could make them believe that the world was ending, I still thought that they wouldn’t. Though they would still be alive when I left them, they wouldn’t be for long. In both cases, our goodbyes to the people who had raised us were equally final, despite her mother already being dead and her father being missing.
“Just give me a minute. Okay? I’ll call you in if I need you.” I told her.
She just stared out the window at the sky that was beginning to darken over our heads. The drastic change in the weather was enough to convince me of the impending end of the world. The sun never broke through the thick, threatening clouds; we were in a state of perpetual night. I wondered if anyone else found the overcast days and pitch black nights as ominous as I did. People who hadn’t had the dream would surely shrug it off as just a nasty bout of depressing weather, but I knew better. I found myself staring up into the sky as I walked to the front door of my house.
I turned the doorknob and pushed, being greeted not by the familiar smells of the many strange concoctions my parents invented for dinner but by the distinct iron-like smell of blood. My heart dropped immediately as the realization gripped me; when I had left the night before, another one of those things had come for me. My parents had awoken, aware of a strange presence in the house. They had been killed mercilessly as they stood between me and the thing that had broken in, completely unaware that I was already gone. Their sacrifice was, to say the very least, completely in vain.
I didn’t stumble back at the sight of their bodies lying side by side in front of my closed bedroom door. I didn’t collapse into a fit of tears. I didn't scream hopeless, desperate questions to no one in particular, demanding a reason for the merciless slaughter of my parents.
I lurched forward suddenly as the few bits of food I had eaten over the past day came tumbling from me like my body was trying to expel some deadly toxin. After I wretched and gagged and wiped the tears the exertion had forced from my eyes, I did start screaming. I screamed like I was staring the devil in the eyes and like I was being cut down the way my parents had been.
It’s amazing how in the face of trauma, we revert back to the neediness we had as children. I was young still, but old enough to know that Mom and Dad couldn’t solve all of my problems for me. Yet as I stared down the darkness that had scared me so much as a child, all I wanted was for my parents to run in and tell me that it was all just a nightmare.
Alice and I were so young, and we needed the people who loved us more than anything in the world to solve the ominous riddle of what to do for us.
But they were gone, and I realized, even through the immediate grief I felt at the loss of my parents, that Alice and I were on our own forever.

Violet

It happened while I was sitting in class, staring out the window as a light snow began to fall from the clouds. My teacher was rambling on about cell mutations and the impacts they have on an organism. I knew that even though I wasn't listening.
“It's snowing!” A girl in my class exclaimed, and I couldn't help but roll my eyes; the sudden change in the weather wasn't exactly worth a disruptive outburst. Plus, that girl was in the clique that I despised: A drama nerd whose second interest was writing emotionally charged prose to describe her trivial high school conundrums and mundane hormonal changes. We had Creative Writing together, and every time she shared a piece she had written (which was every freaking day), I tuned her out completely and doodled in the corner of my spiral notebook.
My sister was the one who recommended that I take that class in the first place. She was smarter than me by a long stretch, but we both shared a love of books and writing. I had wanted to become a novelist one day. Our parents told me that unless I wanted to write an autobiography, my dreams of becoming a famous writer would never come true. My sister told me that I could do anything I set my mind to, though she immediately chastised herself for using such a trite expression to encourage me.
“Thank you for pointing that out to us, Emma.” My best friend and sarcastic partner-in-crime, Miranda replied after looking up from her notes. “I'm sure we would have all walked outside without our coats and in cut-off shorts if you hadn't informed us that it's snowing!”
She mimicked her overly excited tone on the last part and waved her hands in the air like a drunken middle-aged bar hopper trying to dance with her younger counterparts. I covered my mouth as I cracked up hysterically. Miranda was the more outspoken one between the two of us. I tried to keep my scathing sarcasm to myself whereas she wore it on her sleeve for all the world to see. I needed that, my sister said. I needed someone who would say what I was thinking so that I might one day learn to do the same. Yes, my sister did frequently talk like Yoda.
I learned everything I knew about life from my sister. My mother's high-class career left little room for focusing on her children. So my big sister, the second-oldest of us all, had to pick up Mom's slack. I had only just realized that as I began to go through the trials and tribulations of adolescence. When I needed help navigating those stormed-upon, erratic waters, my mother would turn away, clueless as to how to assist me. My sister knew by instinct and from experience exactly what to do and say, always.
I loved her for that.
“Thank you, Miranda.” Our teacher said, in slight exasperation, “Everyone, eyes up front, please.”
Our class, who like ferrets with ADHD had turned abruptly to the windows at Emma's outburst, turned back around, muttering about what a heinous so-and-so Miranda was. I looked at her, expecting to see some indication of discomfort at being discussed negatively by our peers but as usual saw nothing but the deepest apathy. I couldn't shake the smile from my face.
“I don't even care.” Emma shot loudly at her friend who was staring back at us, muttering no doubt about how bitchy Miranda was.
Emma certainly looked like she didn't care, if the way she rolled her eyes and shrugged several times was any indication. She raised her voice and said grandiosely, “'Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.'” She turned back to face Miranda, “That’s Mark Twain, in case you didn’t know.”
Now, I know that Emma must have thought she was quite clever for quoting Mark Twain verbatim. Unfortunately, she underestimated Miranda's own knowledge.
“How long did you have to skim through quotes online to find one that might be applicable to real life?” Miranda asked her, “Is that what you do in your spare time when you're not writing pathetic little essays about your closeted boyfriend and your fake suicide attempts?”
“Ladies, that's enough!” Our teacher snapped, “May I continue now, Miranda?”
“Sure, blame Miranda...” Miranda said as she held up her hands in mock surrender, “Continue.”
I shook my head slightly, still grinning, before returning my gaze to the world outside my window. I marveled at the number of kids who had done that very same thing over the years. They had sat exactly where I was sitting, staring out the window, dreaming of the moment the bell rang and they were free. I don't know where my sudden burst of nostalgia came from. My sister would tell me later that my reminiscence was so strong because somewhere in my subconscious, the deeper, more instinctual perception of foreboding was emerging, and as a result, I knew what was to come.
I don't remember the moment when I drifted off. Biology was my long period that day, and we still had over an hour left of class. My teacher's voice was droning on, and the snow was falling softly outside; the sight of it was so calming, so picturesque… I didn’t even realize that it was lulling me to sleep...
A high pitched whirring sound that caused an entire city to fall to its knees. Everyone holding their ears and screaming so loud that their faces were turning red from the effort, and I still couldn't hear them over the screeching sound. Then, a silence so deep that it rattled my brain. It lasted for such a long time; a minute and a half felt like an eternity. Then, an explosion that shook the earth beneath my feet. A tidal wave of fire was barreling towards me rapidly, and there was nowhere to run. There was no escape from this fiery death. For a split second, I felt it swallow me, my skin blasting off, every nerve ending screaming in agony...
I was screaming in agony and in terror when I awoke. As soon as my eyes opened, I saw that the entire class had turned to me, their faces betraying shock, and in a few cases, amusement. I jumped up, sweat pouring off of me like a last defense against the burns I had just suffered.
“What?! What is it?!” Miranda asked as she stood up, too.
“I'm...” I started to say as my teacher walked around his desk to approach me. I pointed at the door, unable to speak now.
“You're fine. Go ahead.” He told me, nodding. His brows were furrowed, and his face conveyed something more than just concern. There was recognition in his eyes that I didn't understand.
“I'm going with her.”
“Yeah.” Mr. Barnes nodded, and Miranda came running out of the classroom after me. I was walking as fast as my legs would allow. They felt weak, and I acknowledged briefly that they were trembling worse than the rest of my body. My sister would tell me later that my survival instinct was still working; my body was trying to save itself from the stream of fire.
The stream of fire... What was it? Why had it been so real?
“Hey, crazy!” Miranda grabbed my arm and turned me around to face her. “What happened? Oh my...” My appearance halted her mid-sentence. I was still sweating, and my face had gone far beyond the white of a ghost's skin. “You need to go to the nurse, Vi. You look terrible.”
“I need to go home.” My throat clenched, and tears started to fall from her eyes. “I just want to go home, Manda.”
“Okay. Come on. We'll go. Mr. Barnes will explain what happened if we get in trouble for cutting. Let's just go.” She grasped my hand, and the contact comforted me more than I would ever have said. We passed teachers and administrators without stopping, walking right out the door into the frigid winter air.
It was the cold that snapped me back to my senses. I started telling her about the dream, rambling on and on with all the grim, terrifying details.
“It was just a dream, Vi. You're just freaked out from it. I remember this one time I had a dream that my teeth were falling out and I woke up...”
“This isn't like that!” I snapped at her, raising my voice to a volume that I didn't intend to reach. “This was... It was so real!”
“All dreams feel real like that, Violet.” She sighed, and I remember how grating that arrogant dismissal of my fears was to me. As she turned the key in the ignition, I started to feel my cheeks getting hotter as I became aware of my irritation. 
“Miranda…”
“Plus, that wasn't just a dream.” She continued, undaunted, “It was a night terror. Remember in Psych what...”
“You don't understand. It was just...” I shook my head slightly, bringing one trembling hand up to my face to rub my eyes.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Home.” I replied instantly, “Manda, if you knew what I had seen...”
“You just told me what you saw. It sounds like the apocalypse to me.”
“If you knew how it felt to see that...” I corrected myself, “I think...”
“What?”
“I think the end of the world is coming.”
“The end of the world?” She asked me with so much skepticism and sarcasm in her voice now that I could have slapped her. “It was just a dream, dude. I get that it feels real to you still, but you just had it. In a couple of hours, you'll be fine. I told you, I had a dream once about my teeth falling out...”
“This was nothing like the dream where your teeth were falling out! That's a vanity thing, Miranda! This was... catastrophic!” I yelled at her, and luckily, we had pulled into my neighborhood because she slammed on the brakes, angered by my outburst.
“I'm just trying to make you feel better.” She told me bitterly, “But if you want to believe that you just had some sort of psychic vision and now you have to save the world, then go for it. But I'm not going to tell you that I believe it!”
“You don't know how it felt! You don't know how real it was! I know this is something real. I know it! And I don't need you or anyone else to believe me!”
“Yeah? Then what are you going to do?”
“I'm going to...” I stopped because in that moment, when my frustration had built to such a point that I couldn't control it, my purse that I had put up on the dashboard slid onto the floor. The car lurched forward despite the fact that her foot wasn't on the gas pedal. The lights on the dashboard started to flicker on and off, and the radio blared in our ears at full volume.
“Turn it off!” I screamed at her, covering my ears. But as she reached for the dial to turn back the volume, the car stopped by its own will. Everything was silent, including us.
“What was that!?” She screamed before pointing an accusatory finger at me, “It was you!”
“Me?!” I exclaimed, stunned that Miranda, who was always so logical, could believe something so ridiculous.
“You were angry, so you...” She was frantically trying to explain exactly what I had done and when she came up short (a first for her, believe me), she looked back at me in a terrified rage.
“Get out!”
“What?! Miranda...”
“Get out! You're a freak! You're... insane! You're...”
“Manda, I didn't do anything! Your car was just being weird!”
“It's never done that before! It was doing that because you were mad! You're just...” Another frantic search for an explanation or maybe even an insult, “...a freak!”
“I didn't do anything!” I cried again, tears now starting to stream from my eyes. “Manda, please, I need you to help me. I need you to help me figure this out! I can't do it on my own!”
“Well, then, call your freak sister and get her to help you! You've both always been freaks!”
I should have walked away after that. But I kept begging her, quite shamelessly, to help me. We had been best friends for almost four years, and she had always had a solution to every problem we encountered. We had never fought or disagreed. She had become the first source I went to if I needed to be comforted once my sister moved out. During those times when I needed her, she always knew what to say. It was almost stunning how easily she was able to rectify any fear or sadness I felt.
But she insisted that I leave, threatening to call the police if I didn't. Finally, I knew the battle was lost, and I obeyed. She sped away, her tires squealing and slipping on the ice that had covered the road. I stood there on the street, crying and swiping at my eyes, watching her car move further and further away at a hazardous speed.
I have an awful habit that I learned from my sister. When I cry, I feel weakness. She was so good at forcing her sadness away to some deep, dark recess inside of her that our parents worried that she harbored sociopathic tendencies. When she felt any level of despair towards anything, she flipped some switch in her mind to anger, an emotion that, in her not-so-humble opinion, was far more dignified. Everything came back to anger with her. That particular tendency didn't abate my parents' anxieties over her potential for depravity.
I was not nearly as skilled at suppression as she was. But as I watched Miranda's car speed to the end of the street, I felt my sadness flip abruptly to anger. I was furious that she had abandoned me when I needed her. I was furious that she had called me a freak. But above all else, I couldn't stand that she didn't believe me.
It wasn't her fault that she doubted my story. I wish I had known that then. I'll never be able to express how strongly I wish that.
I don't know exactly what happened, but as that rage gripped me, I heard one loud pop that was actually the sound of four tires exploding simultaneously. I watched Miranda's car veer sideways suddenly. Even from where I was standing, I could hear her feet furiously stomping on the brake pedal. The snow silenced what would have been a deafening bang as the car slammed, head-first, into the lit street lamp. The bulb inside flickered twice before going out.
As quickly as that anger had taken me in its grip, it dissipated. It was a snap of the fingers, a jolt that happened in less than a millisecond. It melted away like the flakes of snow landing gently on my face. My mind went completely blank as though every memory and every bit of knowledge had been wiped away in one swipe. I was running to the car but didn't realize it. My footsteps were being erased by the rapidly falling snow. The snow... I didn't even feel it anymore, nor did I feel the cold air that had made it possible.
When I reached the car, the grief was immediate. I had no way of knowing if Miranda had died, but I was sure that if she was still drawing breath, it would not be for long. I felt around in my pockets for my cell phone before I realized, with a sickening turn of my stomach, that it was back in my purse at the far end of the street.
I know that I felt it. Just as I had turned to run towards where my purse lay in the snow several yards away, I felt her heart stop beating. I felt her life dissipate. It is a sensation that I can’t describe to you, except by saying that it was like a sudden lightness had come over me, as though what had essentially been the heaviness of life-- of a heart filled with blood, lungs filled with air, a brain filled with thoughts and worries and memories—was gone, and it had been abruptly replaced by a heavier fear, a disorienting displacement, and heartbreakingly childish confusion. “Where do I go?” “What happened to me?” I could almost hear her asking me, but I was frantically trying to tell myself that I was imagining it.
My knees buckled, and I was lying with my face in the snow as horrified, frenzied sobs shook not just my physical body but my soul, as well. You could never imagine it, or maybe you can, given the state of things.
I don't know for sure if the accident was my fault. I will never know for sure if I killed Miranda. Most people wouldn't want to know, but honestly, I would give my dying breath for that certainty. If her death was my fault, she deserves for me to suffer for it. She deserves to watch from above as the guilt I feel drives me insane. Even though I couldn’t control it, if in fact it was my burgeoning power that had caused it, I still deserve to suffer, because she did not deserve to die. 
I looked up after several long, truly agonizing moments. I wanted to run to the car, pull her out, and give everything I had left in me to revive her. But the thought of her mangled body brought a wave of warmth from the pit of my stomach that came spewing out onto the ground. Once the last of it had fallen from me, I was in the clutches of another bout of tears that sent me falling sideways into the snow.
If there are words for that kind of longing regret and harrowing guilt, I cannot find them, even after all these years have passed.

Brynna

“I realize that you're getting tired, but unless you want to die right now instead of when the end of the world occurs, I would not suggest you letting me drive.” I snapped at James as I furiously cleaned my glasses with a terrycloth.
We were both tired, hungry and cold. We were cold because for some inexplicable reason, the heater in his car had broken. We stopped the heated disagreement we had been having to stare at it in shock. Then, we tried to blame the faulty heating on each other, quite ridiculously.
“We are an hour from your house, you said. I'll grab the wheel in the event of an emergency.” He snapped back at me in a voice dripping with sarcasm.
“No, you will not, because you will be asleep! Is that not why you want me to drive in the first place? Something tells me that while you're dozing peacefully, you will be unable to stop a fatal car crash from occurring. Given that I do not want to die nor do I want to commit vehicular manslaughter, I need you to remain conscious.”
“I wasn't planning on going to sleep. I was just going to rest my eyes. I've told you that now like, seven times. Has it absorbed yet?!”
“You will not be alert either way! If you want to place your life into my hands, then pull over, and I will drive.”
“No. Forget it. You're never going to let me hear the end of it if I make you drive. God, I thought you said you were a genius...”
“What in the name of all deities and Gods does my proven genius have to do with my ability to drive in inclement weather? I don't drive in the snow!” I threw my cigarette out the window in a huff, “Where did the snow even come from?! It was somewhat light this morning!”
“Somewhat being the key term there.”
“I knew you were going to say that! Just focus on the road, please. I do not wish to die today, and the snow is falling heavily...”
“Is that my fault, too?”
I exclaimed loudly in annoyance, my eyes wide.
“God, you are insufferable!” I grabbed the lever on the side of the seat and pulled it, pushing backwards until I was lying flat on my back.
“Don't even go to sleep right now.”
I lowered my sunglasses and closed my eyes.
“No! That is not even fair!
“Okay, it's not fair.” I rolled my eyes, “What are you, twelve?!”
“Just shut up.”
“What?!” I grabbed the lever again and flung myself up, the seat following behind me, “Lest you wish to swallow every last tooth in your mouth, do not tell me to shut up!”
Almost two days without sleep and almost twenty four hours without food turn even the calmest (James) and the smartest (me) people into squabbling, immature children.
I frowned when I brought my hand back from the side of the seat. The lever that moved the seat forward and backwards was in my hand.
“Did you just break something?” He asked, his exasperation evident as his eyes stayed fixed on the road.
I glared at him and reached my hand over. After a moment, I dropped the lever into his lap.
“Damn it, Brynna!”
“I'm sorry that the people who constructed your fancy, high-dollar, electric car were more interested in aesthetics and environmental preservation than quality.”
“Do you always have something to say? Some smart-ass remark?!” He yelled, turning the windshield wipers up to the next speed as the snow began falling even more quickly.
“Turn your lights on.” I said, just to prove that yes, I did always have some derisive comment up my sleeve. I grabbed an issue of Men's Health that was on the floor of his car. On the cover, there was some buff movie star posing in a loincloth for a film that the headline exclaimed was made for well over two hundred and fifty million dollars. Even if the world wasn't ending, the film would probably bomb.
“Is that interesting?” He asked me.
“I thought we were shutting up.” I replied coolly.
“I never said I was shutting up, and since when do you listen to me? I'm interested to know exactly when that started happening.”
“I'm not listening to you. I'm not talking to you because you're irritating me. So I am going to read this very interesting issue of Men's Health.” I was silent for a minute, scanning through an article but absorbing not a single word. The silence between us was raising the hair on the back of my neck.
“Do you find this sexist drivel interesting?” I asked him, and he sighed heavily.
“Just when I was starting to enjoy the quiet...” He muttered, and I took my time rolling up the magazine before I whacked him hard in the arm with it.
“Ow!” He exclaimed, “And I'm the one who’s twelve?!”
“I will make you a deal, James Maxwell.”
“Okey-doke, Brynna Olivier…” He replied sarcastically.
“I am normally quite unskilled at socializing with people from any of the various intellect levels. However, I find your inferior intelligence to be quite engaging, and the bottom line is, I just can't stand the silence right now. So, I propose that we talk like the rational adults I know that we both are.”
“I'm sorry...” He shook his head slightly in disbelief, “Did you just say that I am of inferior intelligence to you?”
I put the magazine on the dashboard delicately, “That question and your random apology prove it.” I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window slightly.
“Are you being humorous?”
“Proven again.” I told him, shaking my head slightly.
“I'm being serious. Are you joking right now?”
“I don't know.” I asked, exhaling smoke at him, “Am I?” But a grin was tugging at the corners of my mouth that he saw when he glanced over at me. I raised my eyebrows and gazed back at him impassively.
He laughed quietly to himself and shook his head, muttering, “You are something else, I'm telling you.”
We were quiet once again, and I could see clearly that he was enjoying the lull in conversation. I turned my head to look outside, blowing smoke rings and watching them quickly evaporate upon meeting the air that whizzed past my open window.
“What I find interesting...” I said, and he exclaimed in only slight irritation, “...is that you've been like a bull for the past hour and I, the red cape. Our arguments have ranged from the sensible to the absolutely ludicrous. It was only when I insulted your intelligence that you were calm. Why?”
“It doesn't carry any of the significance you think it does. I was just humoring you. Now, why do you think Men's Health is sexist drivel?”
“Look at all of these advertisements they run. I mean, it's better than Cosmopolitan, surely.”
“Is that the woman's magazine that's all about how to please men?”
“Indeed, it is. I am surprised you know what it is.”
“I go to the grocery store like every other human being on the planet.”
“I am just surprised you made a note of it.”
“I am also surprised I made a note of it.”
“Our world is strange. Our culture is strange. There is such an emphasis on how we look. These magazines are an example of it. We pride ourselves on our pride, if you will.”
“I will.”
I smiled and chuckled softly.
“Shut up, James.”
He grinned, too.
“Do you think that's why the world is ending?” I asked him, serious now.
“Why? Because magazines make us feel bad about ourselves and force us into believing we have to change our appearance to fit their standards? I think it's a little bigger than that, Brynna.”
“Don't be condescending.”
“Why not? You're condescending.”
“I am trying to make sense of this right now. Catch a bubble.” I replied hurriedly, holding my hand out in his direction but not looking at him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
I took a deep breath and puffed my cheeks out as I held the air to demonstrate. For a moment, I thought he might slap me. Then, his face broke into a smile.
“That's clever.”
“I cannot take credit for it. Please know that what I just showed you was born from a moment of whimsy we cannot afford.”
He drew in a deep breath and exhaled, rolling his eyes.
“You're so weird.”
“Perhaps. Now, be quiet and let me stew over the topic. I should have an answer to my question momentarily.”
“I don't think there's any way to know for sure why this is happening.” He replied instantly, and now I was the one rolling my eyes. “I do understand what you're getting at, though. Is it our vanity, our lust, our depravity as a whole that made some higher power want to snuff us all out? Do we deserve it?”
“Do we, James?” I asked, looking at him now.
He was quiet for a long moment, pondering the question. I thought about it more in depth throughout that silence than I had previously. I was not religious in any sense of the word, but I had studied most religions extensively. I was fascinated by the blind devotion of those who followed a specific creed. I wondered where their resignation came from. I wondered how they could glory in the grace of a Creator whose sole endgame was to smite the earth. In Christianity, there was the notion of the Rapture, as I had been told. The good people would be taken to heaven before the fireworks started. There was the Book of Revelations, the most epically disastrous and depressing ending to a book in the entire history of the written and spoken word. In Hinduism, there was the Kali Age, where the world would cease to exist because it was meant to, and to hell with whoever remained. Some religions, like those followed by the Native Americans and Mayans, had symbols whose meaning told of the impending end for us all.
All religions knew that this was imminent and all had their different take on why it was so. I prided myself on having all the answers when a logical question was posed. But this was beyond logic. This was what those spiritual people would call “faith.” I marveled at it and was beguiled into a silence that was uncommon for me.
“I just don't know, Brynna.”
James's voice struck me down from the philosophical speculation in which I was engaging, and I was quite grateful, though his answer to my earlier question brought no relief.
“We'll never know.”
I nodded but said nothing, reaching for my cigarettes again. I was momentarily confused by the way my body was suddenly trembling when I looked up to see a figure lying in the road.
“Watch out!” I exclaimed, and he slammed the brakes. The force from the sudden stop sent me flying forward, and since I was bent down trying to retrieve my purse, I was going to smash my face against the dashboard. But James's arm jerked out in front of me, stopping the movement before one blink. The car slid forward on the snow but stopped just in front of the person lying. Whoever it was didn't move.
“Oh my God or Gods...” I muttered, seeing a car that had slammed into a light-post. I jumped out, unsure of how to proceed. Anyone inside of the wreck was surely dead, but the girl on the ground could have been alive.
“Brynna!” I heard James yell as he got out of the car. On the cold, abandoned street, with the snow falling around us, I ran to the girl lying down in the road, with only the sound of the windshield wipers moving every few seconds in my ears.
“Oh my...” I muttered as the recognition gripped me. My feet slipped and slid in the snow, but I ran faster until I was right above her. The girl turned over and squinted up at me through the tears that were pouring from her eyes.
“Brynna?” She asked, and I fell to my knees beside my sister. My arms furiously scooped her up into a sitting position.
“What happened to you? Are you okay?” I asked her hurriedly, putting both of my hands on her face, “Violet! Were you in the car?”
She shook her head and pointed at the wreck. I am not the person to turn to when one needs comfort, as my own emotions do not function in a way that could ever be described as normal. I can feel concern for someone down to my core, as I did with Violet then, but that should not suggest that when there is an emotional outpouring, I can remedy it. I did not know why she was pointing to the car or why she was crying. If she hadn't been in the vehicle then she more than likely did not know the person who was.
“I'm going to call 911.” James said from the car, “She's dead, but they still have to come get her and clean up the wreck.”
“No! Don't!” Violet jumped up and ran towards him, taking his cellphone right out of his hand, “I did this!”
“You did what, Violet?” I asked her with one hand rested on her arm.
“I caused it! It's my fault!”
“You said you weren't in the car!” I told her, throwing my hands up in frustration, as I always did when a situation was just not making any sense to me. I did not enjoy when my enhanced mental abilities were trumped by mysterious and illogical circumstances.
“I wasn't!” She sobbed, “But I was... I had this dream... and...”
James and I looked at each other as she threw her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder. By then, she was out and out wailing, but the sound was drowned out by my rushing, panicked thoughts. Both James and I knew that there was only one dream of which she could be speaking.
“Well, you were worried about having to convince them.” James told me as he turned us both around and started walking us back to the car. “See? The hard part's over.”
Her grip on me was so tight that I couldn't break free to get back into the front seat. So I maneuvered us both into the backseat and wrapped my other arm around her to pat her head awkwardly. James watched us in the rear-view mirror, and I could tell by the way his eyes were squinted that he was smiling slightly at my discomfort.
“Shut up, James.” I muttered, and he didn't hide it anymore; he laughed softly, despite the situation.
“Who is he?”
“I'm James. I know you're Brynna's sister, but that's about all I know.”
“He's making it sound like I have not talked about you extensively. I have. She's Violet.” I told him.
“I could make a really ridiculous joke right now to lighten the mood.”
“Please don't.” I replied with another eye roll.
“Okay.”
“Vi, who was in the car?” I asked her bluntly, the tenderness that would be most comforting to her completely absent from my voice and demeanor. I didn't try to be so cold. It just happened.
“It was...” She started crying harder again, and I heaved a great sigh of frustration, resigning myself to the fact that I would probably never know. “Can you please put your weird emotional tendencies aside for two seconds and just be my sister!?”
“What are you even talking about? I am embracing you, aren't I?” I snapped at her in offense. I was unsure how she could suggest that I never comforted her. Or perhaps I was just flustered and irritated that she had called me on my strangeness and complete lack of knowledge on empathy.
“You've gotten so weird since you moved out! You used to be able to make me feel better no matter what was wrong! Now you're weird!”
“Alright, you are very upset right now.” I told her, “And you're saying things that would be hurtful if it weren't for the fact that I...”
“...that you're a cyborg!” She exclaimed, pulling away from me, “I just killed Miranda!”
“Miranda who?” I asked.
“Miranda! My best friend Miranda who you've only met like, a hundred times!”
I had seen the girl around the house every day of every summer since Violet had been in seventh grade. The two young friends were inseparable from the moment they had met. Why Violet would resort to murder to dispatch her best friend, I was not sure. A simple “I think it's time we go our separate ways” would have sufficed.
“Stop having weird thoughts! God, they're so loud!” She shrieked as she covered her ears. My heart plummeted several feet, and my stomach churned dangerously. My threshold for tolerating strangeness was beginning to lessen. Violet was telling me now that she could hear the mental dialogue occurring inside of my head. The fact that she could read into my innermost thoughts was upsetting to my mind, which valued its privacy, my heart, which worried for the implications such a power would surely have on our lives, and my stomach, which was finding these rapid succession of surprises utterly intolerable. I ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to keep my breaths steady.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded, and when she didn't answer, I grabbed her arm and shouted, “Violet, what are you talking about?!”
“I am well aware that this keeps getting stranger and stranger.” Violet told me, “That's what you just thought. 'This keeps getting stranger and stranger.' I don't know what's happened to you today...” She stopped, looking off at something I couldn't see, “Brynn, what...”
“What are you doing right now?”
Her shaking hand grasped the bandage that was wrapped around my forearm, and her eyes traveled up to gawk at the one on my head. 
“What could have bitten you like that?”
The bandages were covering the wound. There was no way she could have seen them and determined that they were bite-marks. 
“Violet, stop it!”
I didn't know what I wanted her to stop. Something about the sudden change in her, though, was giving me a feeling of unease that made my mind twirl and drop in a nauseating, indiscernible pattern. James had parked in front of our house and turned around to look at us, his eyes wide with curiosity and concern.
“When you said that...” Violet was looking at me now with her luminous, searching, brown eyes, “They cut off. When you told me to stop, the stream stopped.” She shook her head slightly and whacked herself in the face with both hands. “What is happening to me?!” 
She threw her arms around me again, and this time, I squeezed her back as my love for her and my fear for her exploded inside of me; that blast swallowed everything in its path.
The explosion. It was coming.
“Listen to me.” I took her head and lifted it somewhat abruptly, “I want you to go inside and pack a bag. We know what's coming. We know what you saw in your dream.”
“An explosion and everyone...” She stopped to breathe heavily with one hand grasping her chest. I put my hands on her face.
“Violet, I need you to focus. I need you to pull it together just for right now. Later, we'll talk about everything. James and I will explain everything we know, and anything that you need to say, you can say it. But right now, we have to get the hell out of here. Understood?”
I hadn't barked like a drill sergeant rousing his lazy troops but I had certainly come close. A new urgency was consuming me now. It was reminding me that with each passing second, the imminent end moved closer and closer. We were running out of time.
Violet nodded, and in a voice trembling with the same pure, child-like terror that I was beginning to feel but refused to show, whispered: “Brynna... what were those things?”
I shook my head.
“Later.”
***

“Was Maura watching Penny today?” I asked Violet hurriedly as the three of us went storming into the house.
“I think so. Why?”
“Because she's coming with us.”
“What about Mom and Dad?” Violet asked, and another look passed between James and me. He had told me that my parents had basically been voted off the island, or in this case, the ship. I figured that the time to tell my sister that little detail would be much later, once we landed on Pangaea. But the question I faced right then was whether I should lie and say that they would be meeting us there, or if I should just dodge the query entirely.
If I told the truth, we would never be able to convince her to go. She would die for two people whose actions were responsible for her very premature and tragic death. But if I lied to her, I revoked her right to make the decision for herself. She would surely resent me for it, someday, but I had no time to deliberate on the permanence of such resentment. In fact, I had no time to contemplate whether I cared about being resented by her, at all. 
James solved the dilemma for me when he said, “Right now, we just need to get your stuff together. Everything else can wait, Violet.”
She nodded and scampered off to her room.
“Only necessities, Vi!” I called after her before my eyes came to rest on him. His gaze met mine, and he looked away, feeling, no doubt, awkwardness at standing in the home of two people whom he had only seen on television. Or perhaps he felt awkward because of our earlier squabbles. 
“Thank you.” I murmured to him, not only because I was truly grateful, but also to diffuse the tension.
“For what?”
“For answering her. My mind started racing there for a moment, and I could not come to a decision.”
“I didn’t know you were making a decision on whether or not to tell her, or I wouldn’t have intervened. That’s your decision, Brynna. But if you want my opinion on it”
“No. You were right. I should not bring it up now. I should not tell her until we are safely on Pangaea. Then, she can hate me if she wants.” I was nodding as I spoke, realizing as I spoke my logic out loud to him that it made quite a bit of sense. “But until then, she and Maura know nothing.”
“Fair enough. Is there anything that you want here?” James asked me as he observed the foyer of my parents' lavish home. I found myself scanning the familiar surroundings, feeling nothing but an icy resolve to feel nothing. Even as I took in the sight of the two-sided staircase I had come hurtling down as a child on my rush out the door every morning before school, I was expressionless. Even as I glimpsed the kitchen with its warm yellow walls where Maura had made me breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, my heart was not stung with even the slightest twinge of pain. As I looked at each formal picture of my mother, father, and siblings placed apart in perfect distance from the last that adorned the walls, I only frowned slightly and closed my eyes until every terrible feeling that could possibly roar to life and every acidic tear that could emerge into my eyes fizzled away into nonexistence.
As I said, I had always been good at feeling nothing.
“There's nothing here for me, James. There never has been.” I walked past him, beckoning for him to follow me, “Maura!”
“Who is that?”
I heard the voice that had been ever-present in my life for as long as I could remember and instantly, the harried anxiety I felt lifted. It was for a moment as brief as death but it was a moment I have never been able to shake. I found myself running to meet her as she came into the kitchen, followed closely by my youngest sister, Penelope.
“Brynn!” Penny exclaimed, her excitement upon seeing me as refreshingly childish as it always had been. Despite the circumstances growing ever dire as the time progressed, I couldn't help but smile as she threw her arms around my middle and squeezed me as though she hadn't seen me in years.
“Hey, turnip.” I greeted her softly as I leaned down to kiss her forehead.
“Maura, Brynn came to see us before pick-up day!”
“I see that.” Maura said through a joyful chuckle as she wrapped her arms around my neck. She broke away from me abruptly and held her hands up in mock apology, “I'm sorry. I know you no longer like hugs.”
Maura had come to America from England about ten years before I was born. She had been an exchange student set to attend Yale the following fall. However, her scholarship fell through when she met my father there. He enticed her with his charisma and good looks, only to drop her abruptly when she became pregnant with their child. She found herself so despondent as a result of the sudden breakup that she stopped attending classes. For years, she took every job she could in order to stay in the country before my father contacted her out of the blue many years after their last meeting to tell her that my mother was pregnant and they would be needing a nanny. He offered her good money and a place to stay for which he would help her pay.
I try to think that my father did all of that to assuage the damage he had done to her. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt. I try that only to be snapped back to reality by the fact that the only reason he hired her was so he could have a woman on the side who would take care of his needs when my mother shunned him. I feel no sense of regret for Mom, but I do feel slightly sorry for Maura.
“Young and naïve...” She had told me once after imbibing a little too readily one night, “Don't ever fall victim to their wiles, my dear. The only person who will pay for it in the end is you.”
After many more of those drunken conversations, I finally got up the nerve to ask her why she didn't tell him, in colorful British terms, to go screw himself. England surely would have been a welcome sight after so many years. Even though my own home was as painful to view as a particularly nasty roadkill pile on the side of the freeway, she had no reason to hate her home country. Why didn't she return to it?
“What, and leave you?” She had asked with a bitter laugh, “I shudder to think of it, Brynna Claire.”
But, I digress...
“Have I ever liked hugs? Isn't that the real question here?” I asked her, and I narrowed my eyes at her and pursed my lips in a surprisingly good-natured show of sarcastic teasing.
In response, she rolled her own and looked up to the heavens for the answer as to how to deal with such crassness. I heard James laughing to himself in the background.
“And who is this?” Maura looked from me to James and back again, “Are you making friends in the city?”
“I guess you could call him that, if by friend you mean, 'irritating gangly cling-on with no sensitivity.'”
James was still smiling as he reached his hand to Maura for her to shake.
“You've been dealing with this for twenty-two years? You have my greatest sympathy. I'm James Maxwell.”
“Maura Taylor. I suppose you could call me Brynna's nanny. Or former nanny, as she’s clearly all grown up now, if she’s being accompanied by…” She closed her eyes, furrowed her brows slightly, and shook her head, a gesture of hers I knew signaled discomfort and confusion. “I’m sorry, you're her...”
“Friend.” He replied simply.
All confusion and discomfort evaporated, and her gaze bore into his sternly.
“You better be only her friend, James Maxwell.”
“Okay!” I threw my hands up in the air, “Can we get serious for a moment?”
“I was being very serious.” Maura informed me, and I didn't have time to decide whether she truly was or not.
“Look, I know this is all very exciting, given that you have not seen me in ages, and I have this striking fellow following me around…”
“And now I’m striking. A second ago, I was gangly…” He murmured.
“Shut up, James.” I said over my shoulder without looking back at him before looking at Maura again, “I have to tell you something, and it is serious. It is gravely serious, and you might want to sit down...”
“Oh, dear Lord...” Maura closed her eyes and grasped one of the chairs around the kitchen table, “When is it due, Brynna?”
I had not utilized a DVD-spewing box in front of a convenience store or even visited my local library in quite a while. If I had, I certainly had not told her about it, as both occurrences would be quite unremarkable. Besides, both would not warrant the sudden change in her demeanor and the way she immediately went pale.
Perhaps she believed that I had gotten myself into debt with some loan sharks in a smoke-filled casino, though for the life of me I didn't know what had given her that idea. Even though I was vastly intellectually superior to the neanderthals that frequented such establishments, I had never had an interest in gambling. Plus, the closest casinos were miles away. Someone who had no interest in gambling would not drive hundreds of miles away to gamble.
“Whoa...” James said suddenly as he realized to what she was referring, “Ms. Taylor...”
“Is that who you are, Mr. Maxwell?” She asked sardonically, “Are you the father?”
“Is he the what now?!” I exclaimed, my eyebrows raising in alarm, “Maura, you think I'm pregnant?”
“I told your parents you were not ready to live on your own. With your potential, Brynna Claire, how could you just throw it all away... After everything I've told you! After I told you about what happened to me...”
“Are you serious right now?! Biology, history, and anthropology would dictate that in order to conceive a child, one must...”
“Don't even start the rambling, overly intelligent monologues with me!” She snapped furiously. “That might work on your parents who are so thick they don't even realize you're being facetious, but I am well aware of the fact that you try to weasel your way out of conflict with...”
“Would you just let me tell you that I'm not pregnant before you suffer heart failure? I am trying to save your life here, Maura!”
“And you try to use your dry sense of humor to distract me...” She calmed down, my words settling into her mind enough that she could comprehend their meaning, “Oh. Well, you should have said that right off!”
“Well, I apologize for alarming you. I did not realize you thought I was so thick-headed that I wouldn't be able to properly utilize contraceptive methods.”
“She drives me mad, James.” Maura looked at him wearily as she eased herself down into the chair she had been gripping throughout her tirade. “Absolutely mad...”
“I've only known her for a little under twenty-four hours and I can sympathize. Believe me, I can.” 
“Alright.” I turned my gaze to Maura. “I want to say everything I need to say before you cut in.” I looked back at him after registering exactly what he had said. “Shut up, James!”
“See? I can sympathize.” He repeated coolly, and I fought the urge to pick up the nearest heavy object and throw it at his head with all my might.
“What I am about to say is going to sound ridiculous. But I can promise you right now that we are not playing a practical joke nor have we ingested any illegal substances. Okay?”
“Alright.” Her tone conveyed her uncertainty as her eyes looked between the two of us again.
“The world is going to end.” I paused, not realizing that in the moment of silence, I gave her the opportunity to laugh.
“Is marijuana still illegal?” She asked through her hysterical giggles.
“That's random...” I turned my head on the side slightly as I always did when I was confused.
“You said you two hadn't ingested any illegal substance. That was a hot issue a couple of months ago. Legalizing marijuana, I mean. So did they? Is that what's going on here?”
I sighed heavily and muttered, “I told you to let me say what I needed to say before you cut in.”
“You're...”
“I had a dream, almost ten days ago now.” James cut me off to blaze forward with his tale without worrying how she might take it. “I saw the world ending in an explosion. I don't know what caused it, but I know that I couldn't shake the awful feeling that I had after seeing it. So, I went online and I did some searching. At that time, over one hundred people reported having the exact same dream. The details were the same, down to the most insignificant things, Maura. The time between this strange silence and the blast, for instance; we all said it was about a minute and a half.”
“And this source is credible, why?”
“God, I don't know...” I chimed in sarcastically after exhaling my cigarette smoke out of the back door, “Because over one hundred people described the same thing down to minute details?”
“Was it a message board or was it instant messaging? Unless you were talking to someone and you both recanted the details at exactly the same time, what was to stop these other individuals from just reciting your dream back to you? Perhaps they were pulling some kind of cruel practical joke on you.” Maura said reasonably.
“One hundred people were pulling a practical joke on me? People from England, Iran, France, Zimbabwe, China, not to mention a variety of different states here? That doesn't sound very logical, does it?”
“And the world ending soon sounds logical?”
“Look, I don't care if you believe us completely. I just need you to believe me a little bit. I need you to allow yourself to feel however much belief will convince you to go, pack a bag, and come with us, Maura.” I implored, and for good measure, I reached out and grasped her hand in both of mine. She looked down at our joined hands in surprise and then looked back at me.
“Come with you where, Brynna?”
“We're leaving.”
“Where exactly are you planning to run? Where can you go to escape the end of the world?” The conviction I needed to hear in her voice was non-existent, at least not yet. She was merely curious to hear with what I would respond.
“We're leaving Earth. No, do not even laugh right now!” I snapped at her as my anger bubbled over its already dangerously steaming pot abruptly. I stopped, took a breath, and spoke again, this time with my usual air of cavalier, logical, and arrogant calm.
“The people in power have known that this was coming. Something has been going on behind closed doors that would cause this. So, they were proactive and built an escape. I am sure you've heard about the other planet that they found.”
“Yes. They're calling it Pangaea, aren't they? Don't tell me that's where we're going.”
“That's where we're going. It is fit to support human life. All life, actually. It is our best chance. It is our only chance, Maura. I am going to say something now that will convince you. If it doesn't, then you do not know me as well as I think you do. Okay?”
“Alright.”
“I want you to look at me and look at Penny.” Penny had climbed into my lap at the beginning of the conversation and was grasping my arm in both hands, looking terrified despite not understanding the magnitude of the situation. However, our tones and my own shameless beseeching for Maura's belief were enough to convey that whatever was happening was serious enough to be worried about. Plus, children are the most instinctual of us all. They can sense the entirety of the worst possible scenario long before adults get even the slightest whiff of malevolence.
“I want you to think about Violet and Elijah.” My brother, Elijah was away at college. We were stopping to get him on the way to the launch site. He would need no convincing.
“You have been with us all since the days that we were born. I have this one chance to convince you that what I am saying is true. I have this one chance to tell you...” I stopped, unable to continue. To say what I was going to say next would be the greatest showing of weakness I had ever allowed myself to succumb to without a fight.
“What, darling?” She pressed me gently.
I heaved a great, reluctant sigh and looked at her.
“I need you to come with me. I need you.”
I looked away from her eyes when I saw tears rush into them suddenly. Everything I had ever learned about suppressing my emotions had been learned from Maura, and now she was outwardly showing that I had moved her with what I had said. I hated myself for admitting it out loud. Maura had not needed to hear that just to convince her to come with us; she had needed to hear those words from me for many, many years. When I went to let go of her hands, she squeezed mine even tighter.
“Look at me.”
I shook my head ever so slightly, my eyes darting around for something to focus on.
“Calm down,” She whispered, “I'm not going to cry.”
My eyes raised to look at her cautiously, and sure enough, she was telling the truth. She had swiped her tears away before they had a chance to fall.
“Are you packed? Are you ready?” She asked me, and I nodded. “Did you bring your spare glasses?” I nodded again, “Good girl. Give me ten minutes to get your sisters ready and to grab some of Elijah’s things.”
“Okay. I am sorry to scare you so randomly.” I replied, my voice steady. I did not want to embarrass myself by showing anything that even remotely resembled fear. It was not enough to convince Maura, in her infinite wisdom of all of my quirks and flaws; she saw right through my steely exterior into my fearful heart the way she always had, from my birth until the very moment we found ourselves at currently.
“Darling, if this all comes down to you being the one who will save us…” She put both of her hands on my face and smiled slightly, “…then I'm not scared at all.”
***

We were packed and ready to make our mad dash for Elijah's school and then, the launch site. Not one of us, not even Penny or Violet, spoke of my parents again. My sisters did not, because they knew we had no time. They assumed that our mother and father would be meeting us there. I did not speak of them because there were no words to explain the complex emotions I felt upon picturing their faces. After allowing the violent to-and-fro of that complication to continue for as long as I could stand, I forced myself to picture one word. I allowed just one simple word to determine my actions: Overrule. My sole objective was to ensure the survival of my siblings, Maura, and myself. That survival would overrule whatever semblance of love I felt towards the two people I was meant to call my parents.
My eyes traveled slowly around the room in which I was standing; it was the spacious formal living room where my mother and father would entertain their high-powered guests. A memory I had long suppressed bloomed inside my head like a dehydrated flower that had suddenly become drunk on rainwater. I closed my eyes and shook my head back and forth.
Bitterness, Brynna. I reminded myself, Nothing can touch bitterness.
The parties my parents used to hold in that room were the stage on which our family put on our greatest performances. Unity, love, and normalcy were the key points of our act, and we succeeded in conveying all three. They expected award-worthy performances from all of us by the time we were old enough to talk. For a while, I went along with the dubious charade. My siblings were still towing the proverbial line long after I had marched far from it.
“I wish I could understand you, Brynna.” My mother had said to me once after a performance of mine fell short of her high expectations, “I will never understand you.”
A gasp resulting from the sight of her face appearing in my mind drew an unwelcome and pinpoint-sharp entry of air into my chest. She had spat those words at me as though they were the most vitriolic she could think of, and at the time, they stung like the barbs she had intended them to be. 
“Brynna, we have to go.” James told me softly from the doorway. Upon seeing the look on my face or the tension in the way I was standing, though, he stepped into the room further. “I tried to convince them to let your parents come for your sake. They wouldn't budge on it.”
“No. They caused this, in their own way. Do you want to know something that I find rather odd?”
He nodded, gazing at me intently.
“I never knew I had affection for them until this moment. It is not enough to convince me even to call. It is not enough to make me want to say goodbye. But James, it exists.”
He reached out and grasped my hand before saying softly and so gently, it would have brought tears to my eyes if I was capable of crying, “I know it does, sweetheart.”
“And there's someone genuinely good that I have known for a long time. I hate to leave him behind.” I looked at the pad of paper with the expensive fountain pen sitting on top that was adoring the coffee table. On that pad, my mother would scribble notes in the morning, telling us what chores to complete when we got home from school.
I picked up the pen and wrote three words on the clean piece of paper. They were the last three words my parents would see before they were consumed by the flames. In their last moments, I doubted they would care about my final message. But just in case it meant something to them, just in case it would bring them some infinitesimal amount of solace at the end of their lives, I wrote them.
James watched me write and then raised his eyes to look at me.
“That is the best I can do.” I stood to leave the room, avoiding his eyes now. As I passed him, he reached out and grasped my wrist. Then, he turned me towards him and wrapped his arms around me, squeezing me for a moment of comfort I did not realize I needed. My own arms, by their own will, threw themselves around his neck and grasped him desperately for every last moment of life I had left on that world and the one to which we were escaping. I turned my face to his, burrowed it in his neck, and allowed myself to feel whatever I had to in order to keep moving. The complex storm of emotions raged in a valiant last effort to stay alive, but I swiped them all away like God erasing evil from the world in a fabled great flood. I pulled away from James and nodded.
We turned without a word, hearing the car horn blaring as Maura grew impatient waiting for us. Once we were inside the car, she eyed us both suspiciously, and I gave her an almost imperceptible shake of my head to assure her that nothing she had so unwillingly imagined had occurred between James and I while we were in the house for a minute and a half longer than she and my sisters had been. I wanted to add that if something had occurred in that short space of time, something was physically wrong with either one or both of us, but I thought better of it. It was not exactly the time for plucking her nerves, as they were frazzled and dangerously high voltage as result. I knew all too well not to jest with her when she was in such a state.
Maura kept her arms around Violet and Penny in the backseat, but they still jumped up to watch our house shrink further and further away until it was out of sight.
I kept my eyes trained forward. In those three words, I had said all that I needed to say. I had my closure. I had left behind something for them to see, in which they could take comfort. I took care of things and said that which my sisters could not say, as I had done since the day I understood that my role as their old sister meant that I had to be their most indestructible force of protection.
My last words to my parents were different from what theirs would have been. They surely would have said, “I love you” as they had not been so embittered by the two as I had been. But my choice of words was more important than any proclamation of love, in both meaning and significance.
They were the first, last, and only favor I would ever grant my parents.
***

We made no haste in our journey from then on. James sped down back roads, his eyes constantly darting to the shadows in the land surrounding us for hidden policemen or otherworldly creatures. The last thing we needed was to be pulled over. The time it would take to be given our ticket was time that was wasted.
“Did I ever tell you how I found out that the Reapers could change form?” James asked me quietly at one point in our journey. I had been turned around, looking at Maura, Violet, and Penny as they slept. My own tired eyes stopped moving to focus in on the luminescent green digital clock on the dashboard: 1:17 AM. Two days with no sleep.
“Are you going to try to scare me into staying awake right now?” I asked, turning sideways and laying my head against the headrest so I could look at him while he spoke.
“No. It just popped into my mind. Or I guess I should say, 'They just popped into my mind.'”
“Who?”
“Two of the kids I met. I had only ever encountered one Reaper, and besides knowing that it was a female, I was too afraid to really study it. It followed me while I was out in the fields one night.”
“What fields?”
“My ex and I lived on a farm.”
“Oh.”
“I just turned around, and there she was. No tricks. No ruses. Just some deformed, demonic thing following me home.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“I just kept walking, telling myself that I was imagining it. But every time I looked back, she was there. So anyway, I told you about the 'summit' that we all had.”
“Yes.”
“Well, more of us showed up than I ever could have imagined. We consumed the entire top level of that Mexican restaurant on 78th. There was a group there from Iran. Only one of them spoke English and was constantly translating. There was a family of three from Norway. A man from Japan, a couple from Wales, another family from Czechoslovakia, one from Syria... But the two that interested me the most were from right here.”
“Which state?”
“Maryland. They were this young couple. They were obviously off for Christmas break.”
“How could you tell that? Were they wearing shirts that read, ‘Christmas Break Forever, Female Dogs?’”
He gave me a jocular glare of scorn, but its effectiveness was diminished greatly by the smile he was trying to fight. I chuckled softly to myself.
“No, smart-ass, they just looked so young. They said they had traveled for two days to get to us. I asked where their parents were. I asked if their parents would be worried. And the girl kind of shut off, looked away from me, didn't really say anything else. And the boy took a long time to respond. When he finally did, he said, 'It's just us now.' I prodded him a little further, trying to get him to tell me what had happened. You can guess the rest.”
“The same thing you saw?”
“A few differences. Theirs was mutated even more than mine; besides arms, legs, a torso, and a head, there was no way that it had ever been human. Mine still had some qualities about it that made me believe that it might have been a human, do you understand?”
“I do. Well, what exactly convinced you that it wasn't a human? What made you start questioning that?”
“Besides the huge slash in its face where the mouth was supposed to be and the pointed teeth, I knew by the way it felt. It's hard to explain it. It was just... evil, you know?”
I nodded, studying him.
“Strange similarity of paranormal circumstances... You and those kids.” I said, and he murmured his agreement.
“Alright. Your turn.” He told me after a minute of quiet ensued.
“What are you talking about?” I had just closed my eyes but opened them again at the sound of his voice.
“You have to tell me something.”
“Something strange?”
“With you, I'm sure it's going to be strange whether I ask for it or not.”
“Indeed.” I grinned, “Well, since we are on the subject of the impending apocalypse...”
“Is there really any other subject to discuss?”
“No,” I replied, “Not when it is this close. I haven't told you this because I have been too afraid to tell anyone.”
“Well, that's an intriguing start to the story. So it turns out Brynna Olivier does fear things.”
“Only sometimes.” I rolled my eyes.
“You feel something other than disdain.”
“Do you want to hear this story or not?” I asked him, losing my patience with his constant psychoanalysis of me. As I acknowledged the annoyance in my mind, I immediately realized how hypocritical I was for thinking it. At the same time he was trying to analyze me in order to be able to communicate, I was doing the same to him in order to reach whatever small level of trust could be achieved between us.
“I do.” He told me, “Genuinely, I do.”
“Alright, then. Well, obviously you know who my parents are. You know my mom is a senator. You know my dad works for the news.”
“Your dad runs the news.”
“One more interruption, and I lapse back into my thoughtful silence, James Maxwell.” I snapped at him, and he held his hands up in surrender. “Well, I'm sure you remember the rather sudden deaths of Michael West and Rachel Lilien.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Those two were from that news website, weren't they?”
“Indeed. I don't agree with my mother on a lot of political issues strictly because she is who she is. I feel that any opinion she holds surely can't be the moral option amongst her choices. These people felt the same way about her and the people like her. They also hated my dad and said he was running the news so that it would work in the favor of the current administration. Manipulation of stories and facts is nothing new, as I am sure you are aware.”
“I was not aware.”
“Well, now you are. I have always been fascinated by how fear governs our lives without us ever realizing it. What does fear do, James? It gets people in a stir, makes them docile, makes them accept things that go against our most basic freedoms. It is all very subtle. It is unnoticeable, actually, if you are not paying attention. Picture it this way: a younger man goes on a killing rampage. It has happened before, so the idea of a new, fearful trend is perpetuated by my father and his band of white-collar thugs in the media. We get bans on violent video games, censorship on television and even in films, to a certain degree.”
“But is that really so bad?” He asked me.
“I am not looking to have a debate with you on the necessity of censorship. I am only telling you this to set up the rest of the story. This same kid checked out Mein Kampf from the library. Even though his teachers said it was for a history project, we still get new legislation that allows agents to access our library records, regardless of criminal history or lack thereof. Then, the news tells us that this kid was accessing websites about guns and how to use them. Legislation goes through to keep an eye on what we are looking at online. In a world where everyone has gone electronic, we have not one speck of privacy.” I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window.
“Obviously, if the killing rampage occurred, it would be a horrendous tragedy. But to use that terrible and very rare occurrence to keep an illegal eye on things, that is horrendous in its own right. So I presented that imaginary scenario to you in order to tell you this story.”
“Can I have one of those?” He asked me suddenly, and I pulled a cigarette from the pack to give him.
“Those two journalists died three days apart, both of 'natural causes.' One had no history of heart problems, and the other was only forty years old. The latter had no preexisting medical conditions, either.” I stopped, my heart jolting. “As I gathered from the death certificate I found online. They just dropped dead. Now that means one of two things: either God is cruel and takes healthy people from the earth long before sense would tell us they're ready, or there was foul play at work.”
“Weren't they both sitting on something?”
“Yes. It was something exponentially damning, too. It was some sort of bombshell about several of my mother's colleagues. Maybe they even had something on her, too. They were going to post it on April 7. They died on April 6. On April 7, my father's channel reported on the so-called bombshell. But it was fake. My father was on the phone the night before the story aired, and as I was walking by the door, I heard him say, '...just enough to make it plausible.'”
“So, you assumed he was getting ready to fake a story? With those words alone?”
“With those words and the knowledge of how my parents are ruthless in going after what they want, yes. Just in case you were not sure, I will tell you that I had two friends once. They were a couple of years older than me, and they were two of the only people with whom I have ever been able to reach a level of connection. They shared my eagerness for learning things and for keeping an eye on what was going on around us. So, of course, they were the first and only people I went to with what I suspected.”
“And what did you suspect?”
“I suspected that my parents and their shady colleagues had killed two people. It had not been by their own hand, of course. But they had arranged it. We were going to shake things up until we figured out the truth.”
“And then what? What would you do with the truth?”
I looked out the window for a moment, contemplating; we had never decided, in all honesty, exactly what we would do with the truth. I could not tell James that because then I would have to tell him my real reasoning behind my persistence in finding it. It was not to destroy my parents, though truthfully, that was an added perk. It was not for the greater good, even. The sudden increase in emotion I felt as I pondered the question was enough to cease my story. He never could have known how I felt at that moment, but as a young woman who had never been touched by grief and loss before, I did feel something.
“Was that an interruption?” He asked me after a moment, snapping me out of my thoughtful contemplation, “I’m sorry. I'll stop.”
“No.” I replied, shaking my head slightly, “I allow questions. I just don't allow snide remarks. Anyway, we started running searches at the library, thinking that if we checked in under guest accounts, no one could track us. We found the death certificates that said nothing was amiss. We contacted their coworkers at the blog who told us that even they had no idea what the story had been. I call them my friends in lieu of using their real names because even now, I need to preserve their anonymity, out of fear that they are still being watched.”
“The world is getting ready to end, Brynna. I don't think it matters at this point.”
“Force of habit, then, I suppose. We even went poking around their home offices after my guy friend picked the locks on their doors. My guy friend was a genius when it came to computers. His mom and dad were responsible for network security at a law firm and a university, respectively. So he knew his stuff, as they say. Because their deaths were 'natural', their laptops weren't confiscated. We knew that if it leaked that the laptops were taken, it would cement what we already suspected. They couldn't afford that story getting out. So, it was easy enough for us to get in, for him to override the passwords on both, and for us to find nothing.”
“Well, that was anticlimactic!”
“No. It's not. We found nothing because someone had performed a dump on the hard drive. My friend suggested that perhaps they had done it themselves. But if they hadn't been expecting to die, then what was the point? No. It was too big of a coincidence to justify and too strange to write off as nothing. Now, we were like the Scooby Doo gang for two weeks, solving this great mystery that others wrote off as just a glorified conspiracy theory. I think we were so thrilled to be engaged in such important sleuthing that we started getting sloppy. My guy friend didn't wear gloves when he worked at the computer. I accidentally left a cigarette on the fire-escape of R… of Lilien's apartment.”
He was so ready to reply sardonically that he missed my very slight slip of the tongue.
“You made a stupid mistake? I am shocked beyond anything I ever thought was possible.”
I looked at him, raising one eyebrow, pursing my lips and crossing my arms in my typical show of intense discontent.
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry!” He told me quickly, “I'm done.”
“I hope so, because this is your last warning.” I replied with a particularly emphatic roll of my eyes, “Yes, they were stupid mistakes. But the last time I checked, I had not completed even an entry-exam for the CIA or FBI, so please, forgive my indiscretion. I am well aware that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, were they real people, would be rolling in their graves. The point I am trying to make is that I think they knew about this. I think they knew what my parents and their repulsive friends were up to.”
“You think they somehow realized that the end was coming?”
“I do.” I nodded, looking at him again, “My parents were acting strangely. They were always distant but after they started to suspect that I knew something, they cut me off completely. My father kicked me out of the house, and my mother bought me my apartment. I don’t know what happened to my friends.”
“Why would they throw you out, though?”
“Because they didn’t want me to involve Elijah and Violet. If a person is carrying an infection, you put them in quarantine, don’t you?”
“And suspicion was your infection?”
“It was, and it was highly contagious. They were smart enough to know that. They just weren't ruthless enough to do something about it. They did not permanently erase me from the world, though they certainly did erase me from theirs. Do you want to know something? And please, when I say this, do not try to comfort me by denying that it is the truth.”
“You have my word.”
“They would have left me behind.”
He opened his mouth to counter my statement with a denial that I knew was heartfelt and for my own benefit. But after remembering his promise not to dissuade me from believing what I had said, he closed his mouth and stared straight ahead as he drove.
“If that’s true,” He said after another lapse in conversation, “then they deserve to die. I feel no sympathy for them.”
I looked straight ahead also when I responded.
“Do you want to know the end of the story?”
“The story about the journalists?”
“The very same.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Two people died because they posed a threat. When my parents and whomever else was involved committed that crime, they crossed a line that, as far as we know, had never been crossed before. If the world were to go on as it is right now, it would continue to happen. Anyone who attempted to cross them would meet the same end. It sounds overly dramatic, like a hyperbole and a half. But you and I both know that it is the truth.”
“I agree with you.” James nodded solemnly, “But what is their endgame? Yes, your mother can hold office for years upon years, if she wants to…”
“And she does…” I interjected.
“She does. But why? What do they need to accomplish so badly that they won’t let go of their power?”
“I don’t know, James. They could have something up their sleeves, some sort of vision that they want to turn into reality that will take years to accomplish. Or maybe they are just obsessed with power. It corrupts the best of us, doesn’t it?”
“It does.” He shook his head before looking over at me. “I will tell you something, Brynna: You are the oddest twenty-two year old I’ve ever met.”
“Am I non-human?” I asked, grinning.
“I’m starting to believe that is the truth.”
“It’s not. I just say it because I’ve always felt like a freak. I have always been able to remember vast amounts of information, and as a result, my intelligence was so far above average that it bounded right off the charts. What aided my intelligence was my strange wisdom that has always been beyond my years. Maura,” I looked back at her, observing her as she slept, “always tells me that I have an old soul. I believe her.”
“She’s right. You’re maturity is proof of that. I can see why you felt different from everyone else. That had to have been so difficult for you when you were growing up. What caused it, do you think?”
“What caused my maturity to rapidly accelerate to the bewilderment of every mental health professional I was ever forced to see?”
“And what caused your intelligence to reach such an elevated level that you could more than likely win a debate against a forty-year old Ivy League college graduate in possession of three or four PhDs?”
I giggled softly for a moment; I will admit that when adults complimented my intelligence and maturity, I did feel a strong sense of pride that was so refreshingly different from my usual arrogance.
“I told you that I have been reading voraciously since I was small. I have always had a need to learn things. For a long time, it was my only escape from the ridiculous drama around me. I could disappear into college textbooks, internet databases, and academic journals. I would memorize things, but it wasn’t just a verbatim recitation that I could give when asked about certain topics. I had insight into them. It took some time to gain it, but I just read and read until I could understand everything clearly. When I decided that I needed an even deeper escape, I would read fiction. That was escapism at its finest.”
“What were your favorite books?”
“Well, I read Dickens as a child a lot. I loved how he took a culture that today, we see as being so full of grace and dignity and turned it into a third world slum. Historically, it was one, but his writing challenged my preconceived notion of England by teaching me that history. Not that I believe England is a third world slum now, Maura…” I muttered, looking back at her even though she was still fast asleep. James chuckled. “I love England. It was just an interesting perspective to experience nowadays. Of course, I can understand it completely now, because I have seen this world as what it truly is. I have seen what it was intended to be. As a result, I can see a third world slum that reaches every corner of it in reality.”
“Well, then, you’ve just answered your own question about where your insight came from.”
“Did I?”
“You gained your knowledge from the factual information you read. You gained your insight from fiction.”
“That’s an interesting theory.” I told him with my head on the side as I contemplated what he had said.
“Isn’t it? It’s factual as well as interesting.”
“Normally, I would glare at you with venomous disdain for declaring the unshakeable truth of an unproven statement you made yourself, but I believe you, James.”
“Well, thank God for that. I don’t know if I could survive another venomous glare of disdain from Brynna Olivier.”
“You are right about that.”
“So, would you change any of it? Your intelligence? Your personality? Your strangeness?”
“Hell no.” I said emphatically, “I am blessed to be this way. I never let myself forget that. I might not have been popular. I might not have had more friends than fingers. But my teacher said to me once, ‘You have a great mind. Use it,’ and I have never forgotten that.”
“Well, he was right, and you shouldn’t forget it. We’re going to need you on Pangaea more than you know, Brynna. We’re going to need someone who can think like you. We’re starting life over. We are starting from nothing. We’re going to need you to help us find our way.”
“Well,” I replied as I turned my head to gaze out of the window, “I don’t know about that, James.”

Quinn

We found Alice’s father while we were on our way to the launch site. We had just met many of the other people who had suffered through the same terrible dream that I had. It had taken very little convincing for Alice to finally grasp the severity of the situation after that. 
“You really did see it, Quinn.” She told me incredulously as we drove around, searching for a new motel. “You really did see the end of the world.” She reached over and entwined her fingers with mine, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”
I looked at her, with a hint of a smile on my face.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, either. If you had come to me with that, I would have said you were nuts.”
“I did think you were nuts.” She laughed despite the situation, “You’ve always been crazy, but I really thought that you had finally lost it completely.”
“I’m crazy?” I asked, “This coming from the girl who did six shots of tequila in a row at Rachel’s party?”
“Hey, just because you’re a lightweight and you wouldn’t have been able to handle it doesn’t mean you have to bring me down, baby.”
We both laughed, sounding more like ourselves than we had in days.
I turned the headlights on as night descended on us. Originally, we were going to sleep in the car, but after trying the first time (and sitting up for the duration of the night picturing the monstrous face of another one of those things) we buckled and checked into a motel perched right behind an adult store and a tattoo parlor. It was a classy place, believe me...
I pulled off of the interstate as Alice fell into one of her dazes. I had seen her laugh for the first time that day and I knew that she would recover from the horror she felt at killing her mom. I hadn’t been sure of that before. It would definitely take time, but the grief and the guilt would pass eventually.
I was able to force my own sadness away for her sake. I knew that while I had found my parents senselessly murdered, my own feelings were nothing compared to Alice’s. She had killed her mother and still had no idea if her father was alive, dead, or if something worse than the latter had happened to him. I couldn’t imagine how terrifying that was.
The man who was sitting with his feet up on the check-in desk eyed us curiously as we checked in. We were too young to be traveling on our own, and people everywhere reminded us of that by staring at us like we were attractions in a freak show. It had to have looked really weird to see two teenagers who clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating well traveling the country alone. The back stories those people must have fabricated for us would have been truly entertaining to hear. In one of her better moods, Alice and I created some of those fantastical scenarios ourselves to explain away the stares we got wherever we went. Alice imagined that they thought we were runaways, escaping the wrath of our parents who disapproved of our relationship and the love child we had conceived. I went further than that, telling her that they thought we were escaping conviction after committing an unreported Bonnie and Clyde-like shootout with the police. I witnessed another one of her laughs that had become so rare, and my spirits were lifted.
We went to our room, which was better than the last, at least. Alice went to take a shower as I carried our bags inside. Though we never stayed more than a night in one place, I still liked to have our bags inside with us. It was a waste of energy to haul them to and from the room, but for the sake of consistency, we wanted the things we had brought from home with us at all times.
“I hope there’s a washing machine on this spacecraft.” Alice told me as she came out, wrapped in a towel. “We’ve already worn almost all the clothes we bought.”
“Do you want to go shopping one last time?”
She flashed me a smile of recognition; she knew I was attempting to make her feel better, as I knew that she loved shopping as much as the next girl.
“Maybe.” She replied as she grabbed some clothes from her bag and went back into the bathroom to change.
“Well, we might as well, right?” I told her. “We won’t need money where we’re going. So we should just spend what we have.”
“That would be fun. It’s our last chance to shop at all our favorite stores in the mall. It’s my last chance to buy new jeggings. Or those really cute slipper shoes. Or headbands. None of that stuff will exist in a day or so. Nothing will exist in a day or so.”
She started talking about the dismal end of everything we knew only when she was feeling the sadness for her mother and the fear for her father. I had learned not to try to reassure her. It wasn’t that she cut me off, demanding that I face reality and stop feeding her lies that everything was going to be alright. I just knew that I couldn’t convince her. Every time I tried, I felt a lump in my throat that blocked the blurry words of reassurance I could barely see in my mind from coming out of my mouth. I knew as well as she did that we were leaving a dying planet. Those people who stared at us so quizzically would all be dead within the space of twenty-four hours.
“Do you feel guilty for leaving? Do you feel like we’re kind of...” She sat down on the bed and started to brush out her long, blonde hair, “I don't know... betraying the human race a little bit?”
“I don’t know if it’s betraying the human race. If we were communicating with aliens, passing along top-secret military intel on the human race, then yeah. We’d be betraying them.”
“You know what I mean, Quinn.”
“I do. If we lived here, shouldn’t we die here? That’s what you’re getting at. What makes us so special that we’re the ones who know that we have to leave? Why are we going to be the ones that get saved?”
“That is exactly what I was asking.”
“Do you remember what that guy, James said? He said, 'It doesn’t matter why at this point. Nothing matters except the fact that we had the dream, and they didn’t. We know, and they don’t. That has to mean something.’ I believe him.”
“That guy seemed a little off to me. He seemed a little haunted. That doesn’t really make any sense when I say it out loud. But he seemed like he had seen too many horrible things.”
“Don’t you think that’s how we seem?”
“Well, we’ve been through hell.”
“He's probably been through hell, too.”
“We all have. I just wonder what the whole purpose of it is, that’s all. Why aren’t we just going to die with the rest of them?”
“And we’re back to square one.”
“Yeah. And we’re probably always going to stay there. We all either had this dream or know someone that did. Whether we had the dream or not, we all know what’s coming. What are the chances of us also having been able to get in contact with the people responsible for that spaceship and the people who know all about Pangaea? I know that they all had the dream, which is strange. But don’t you think that’s just so...” She searched for the right word.
“Lucky?” I filled in for her.
“Exactly! It just seems like a huge coincidence, and generally, when something seems like a huge coincidence, it isn’t a coincidence at all.”
“So what is this, Allie?”
“I think it’s fate. I know you don’t believe in stuff like that. But I think we’re meant to go there. We’re meant to start life over. That’s what we’re going to have to do, isn’t it? We’re going to have to rebuild civilization on another planet.”
“I guess so. You know what’s weird? I haven’t thought about what we’re going to do once we actually get to Pangaea. I’ve only thought about getting there.”
“Well, we’re in a situation that is time-sensitive, right? I haven’t thought about it until right now, either. We’ve been too focused on surviving that we haven’t looked at what is going to happen once we’re there. What if there isn’t enough food for however many people are on the flight? What if it turns out people aren’t capable of living there? Maybe there won’t be oxygen. Maybe there will be people already there that try to kill us. Maybe the climate will be too intense for us.”
“Or maybe it will be everything that they’re saying it’s going to be. Maybe it will be the place where we start over, where we have the life that we’ve always wanted.”
“We would have had that here, if it weren’t for the end of the world coming.”
“Who says we would have had it here, Allie? Our parents would have probably torn us apart in the end. They didn’t want us to be together.”
“We shouldn’t talk about them. We shouldn’t say anything mean about them now, Quinn. They’re dead and they were our parents and…”
“I’m not saying anything mean; I’m being truthful. I want to be optimistic about this. You know that I’m normally the pessimist out of the two of us. I’m not being optimistic for your benefit or for mine. I’m seeing things in a positive way because I really think that once we’re there, everything is going to be okay for us. We’ll make a life there. Everything will be good.”
“Or maybe we’ll create some sort of cosmic catastrophe by outrunning our fate.”
“You think our fate is to stay here and die?”
“I don’t know what our fate is. I’m not God, so how would I know? Our fate might be to stay here and die. Then, if we leave, we’re messing with something that’s bigger than us, and I don’t know what the consequences of that would be. Maybe our fate is to go to Pangaea, start over there, and live out the rest of our lives. I don’t see much bad coming from that, and that’s exactly what scares me. There’s no way that we’re going to get there and just live out the rest of our lives in peace. There’s no way that’s possible.’
“Why not?” I asked with a chuckle of disbelief. “Would that be so weird after we survived the apocalypse?”
“There are always things that we have to overcome. What is the point of us living if we’re just going to be skating along with nothing to challenge us? No one ever lives a chaos-free life. There are different kinds of chaos, yeah. But everyone experiences it in one way or another. I think that if we leave here and go to Pangaea, we’ll be facing things that we have absolutely no idea how to handle. We’ll probably end up dying there, too.”
“Don’t say that, Allie. Look,” I reached out and held both of her hands, “we know that we'll die if we stay here. That is for sure. But we have a chance there.”
“A chance to die painfully instead of in a quick burst that we won’t even feel.”
“Who says that we’re going to die there?”
“I just don’t think that we’re going to go there and everything is going to okay for everyone. There will be things there that we have to deal with. It won’t be paradise.”
“I don’t think it will be paradise. We’ll be rebuilding civilization on a new planet. That’s going to be hard, to say the least. But it’s a chance to live, Allie. That’s something that we don’t have here. I’ll tell you how I see it, from my logical, secular view: All living creatures have the instinct to stay alive, no matter what it takes. We will all fight for our lives because that’s our nature. This is our fight. I think that fight will end once we’re there. But if it doesn’t, then we’ll keep fighting. That’s our nature, Allie.”
“That project you did on evolutionary psychology really stuck, didn’t it?” She narrowed her eyes at me and tried to suppress her smile.
“It did.”
“Do you want to know how I see it, from a faith-based point of view? The world is going to end, and that is something that was guaranteed from the beginning. We’re running away from it. We’re escaping the end that was always intended for us. We’re messing with fate.”
“But you said you didn’t know if our fate was to stay and die, or to go there and start over.”
“I don’t. So, either we’re messing with something that was promised for us from day one and we’ll suffer the consequences for it, or God has changed the game.” 
She got up to pull her lotion from the bag. I looked away from her, seriously contemplating everything she had just said, but especially the last part. We had always held completely differing views on the meaning of things. I was always the logical one. She was always the faithful one. We were, in that respect, at least, fire and water. But I sat and thought about her words seriously, wondering if she was right. My brain told me that no, she was deluding herself. She was looking for something Divine in an event that was being caused by people who were in power all over the world.
“Maybe there’s a different God on Pangaea.” I told her after a while. I was trying to make light of the situation, but a part of me meant it as well.
When she turned to reply, I saw only complete seriousness in her eyes.
“There’s only one God, Quinn. It doesn’t matter where we go. There’s only one God.”
***

We departed the motel at three AM. We had no time to waste anymore. Alice slept, and I drove, lost in my thoughts. It was really happening. We were really leaving Earth. We were journeying to a planet we hadn’t even known about a year before, though many in the group we had met told us that the people in power had known for decades. Pangaea had always been their Plan A in the event of a worldwide, catastrophic event.
I wondered what it would look like. I had played a lot of space video games, and like every other person in the world had seen Star Wars. The planets were always vastly different from our own, and sometimes, those differences resulted in grave problems for the characters in the fictitious stories. Alice had suggested that we could go there and find that there was no oxygen. As I pictured walking out of the spaceship, ready to take my first breath of Pangaean air only to find nothing but hollow, dry emptiness, I shuddered. Suffocating certainly wouldn’t be as quick or painless as being blown apart by a massive bomb.
We weren’t even sure that it was a bomb. For all we knew, the sun was going to explode. Doomsday theorists had long suspected that one day, all of the energy the sun harnessed would fire at us, incinerating everything in its path. Some would argue that it was the only consequence of our irresponsibility with the environment. In other words, it would serve us right, as we had done everything in our power since the Industrial Revolution to harm the planet we lived on.
“Mother Nature will fight back.” My father had told me once, as we watched harrowing footage of Hurricane Katrina.
I was young at the time and yet still able to understand the horror that was occurring down south.
“But Dad,” I countered, “The people down there don’t deserve to die!”
“Of course not,” He had replied as he clicked off the television, “But we will all pay the price for what we’ve done to God’s creation.”
I didn’t believe that babble for a second, even then. I was still young enough to believe most of what my parents told me but I had never grasped at faith the way they had. Even when I was required to take Sunday school classes and attend church with them, I didn’t buy any of it. I guess one could chalk that up to precociousness.
The scientists who were instrumental in our escape had no definitive answer, either. One even told me that all his life he had believed in his field of work, never looking to any higher power for answers, as he felt he already had them through mathematics, algorithms, and high probability hypotheses.
“But I know that whatever is coming is bound to make a believer out of me.” He had told me after taking a long drag on the cigarette he was holding with a shaking hand. “We’re escaping it, yeah. But we never would have known this was coming if it weren’t for having the dream. That means something.”
It means something. It means something. That was all anyone could say. I remained unconvinced that whatever would cause the destruction of our world wasn’t just an earthly occurrence. If it was a nuclear war that was about to break out and kill everyone, then it was the result of selfish and imprudent acts by our worlds’ many governments. If it was the sun exploding, it was because we were too ignorant and greedy to protect the land we had inherited.
Faith is a dangerous thing. My grandmother had told me that, and I hadn’t understood what she had meant. But now, as everyone grasped at some reasoning, some explanation for the coming events, I did understand. Alice was even susceptible to it, though she had always been more of a believer than I was; knowing that, I don’t know why I was so surprised at how heavily she was leaning on her faith in those final, traumatic days. 
Just as I was swearing to myself that I would never look for any divine reasoning in what was about to happen, the horrible face of that creature that had killed our parents popped into my mind like a petty taunt from beyond. I shuddered again, contemplating waking Alice so she would distract me by talking about anything else. I looked down to turn the volume up slightly on the radio. That stupid song about roses and their thorns was playing sadly on. Gross...
My foot slammed the brake pedal before I had even looked up. Instantly, every sense was on high alert. I could smell the slowly rotting McDonalds leftovers that were in the trash bag on the backseat. The darkness around me was suddenly intensified, but somehow, I could see for miles in every direction. My eyes possessed a light that could see through shadows. I knew from the last time that had happened that only one thing was waiting in the vast expanse of darkened space on every side of us: a Watcher, as Alice had begun to call them.
I reached over to shake her awake, but she grasped my hand before I could touch her. Looking over at her quickly, I found that she was already sitting up, staring out into the darkness ahead of us with widened eyes. Just like me, she was already on edge, ready to fight. But I also saw in her face an expectation that startled me; she knew that the Watcher lurking somewhere near was the last of our parents. She knew it was her dad.
“They’re suffering.” She whispered.
“What?! Allie, what are you talking about?”
“When they’re trapped in those things… When they’re consumed by them…” She whispered as she reached down and put the car in park.
For a long time, I stared at her, completely lost as to what she was talking about.
“What?!” I said finally. “Are you still asleep right now?”
 “Quinn, they’re still in there!” She snapped at me, “They’re trapped in there.”
She was talking nonsense. The grief had finally gone to her head, and the fear I knew that she felt in that moment didn’t help her even pretend to be level.
“What are you…Wait!” She had jumped out of the car after opening the glove compartment and pushing the button to release the trunk. We kept the shotgun back there, loaded and ready to go.
“What are you doing?”
“You had your dream. I had mine.” She answered brusquely, still speaking softly even though there was nothing but that thing around to hear us.
“Alice, you’re being crazy right now!” I told her as I followed her up the road. “We’re in the middle of the desert, okay?! We can’t do this now!”
She kept walking, not acknowledging a single word I had said.
We heard the throaty shrieking before we had even seen it; it echoed all throughout the open space, amplified to a volume that hurt my ears because there was nothing around to break up the sound. I ran forward to push her down, but she had already fired the gun. The creature had charged right at her from straight ahead, but it had shocked her when it screamed and the bullet missed, veering off too far to the left. She ducked down, and it jumped right over her, running towards me now on all fours.
“Shit…” I muttered, and immediately, my body turned itself, and my legs moved quickly, making me sprint in the direction of the car. I jumped up onto the hood, ran over the top and back down the bottom before jumping onto the pavement and running back around, trying to confuse it. My diversionary tactic seemed to be working; the creature stomped and snarled in frustration, practically tripping over its feet in its attempt to follow me.
“Quinn, bring it down!” She shouted to me, and instantly, I felt a surge go through my entire body so that when I turned around and charged at it, I was running at a speed far greater than anything a human being could be capable of reaching. When I tackled it backwards, for a moment my body stuck to it, frozen with ice that it carried inside. I yelled out and pushed the creature hard, sending it hurtling several feet away from me. When I looked down at my hands and arms where my bare skin had touched it, I found that I was bleeding. My skin had frozen to the thing and stayed attached even when I pushed it away.
“Oh my God…” I muttered, “Alice, it’s frozen…”
“That’s because it’s dead!” She yelled back at me impatiently. “It’s from another place! Just tackle it!”
The creature charged at me again, and this time, I ran back to the car to grab a bungee cord that I suddenly remembered throwing in the trunk two years ago after my father and I finished helping his friend move to Forest Hill, a city four point two miles (or nine minutes) from my home right in the middle of Bel Air...
What the hell? How did I know that?
The beast ran at me like I knew it would. I swung the bungee cord out just as it reached me. The cord wrapped several times around the creature’s neck so that when I pulled down, he fell flat on his back. It hissed, sputtered, and even gasped out a few words. “Smell” and “eat” were the only two I could make sense of. The rest were in a dead language. I knew it no longer existed the same way I knew that I could bring it down: I just knew.
 I held the cord firmly in my hands as I knelt down behind its head. Its hair was black instead of white, but still long. Its features were more masculine; its nose was bigger, its mouth was smaller, and its jaw was more pronounced, though its teeth were exactly the same as the woman's.
“Alice…” It dragged the word out threateningly. She was standing in front of it now, the shotgun at her side. Though she was not aiming, ready to shoot and kill the monster, I could still see the fierceness in her eyes that I had seen earlier as we prepared for the fight we had just won.
“Let him go!” She yelled at the thing, aiming the shotgun at its chest.
“Gone…” It hissed at her, its black eyes turning over white as it smelled the air. I knew that it could smell the blood seeping down my arms.
“He’s still in there! Let him go!” She fired a shot right next to its head. The bullet left a deep dent in the bumper beside my head; I supposed it wasn’t the best time to fuss at her for shooting my car…
I knew that trying to get the creature to let her father go was useless. But I also knew she would never shoot the beast holding him captive without knowing for sure that there was no chance he could be saved.
Her fear was growing, and so was mine. If she didn’t shoot the thing, it would kill us both. The hope that her father could be saved was draining from her face. If I could have let go of the cord that was keeping the creature on the ground I would have gotten up and shot it for her. I couldn’t stand the idea of her having to kill both of her parents.
“Burning…”
Tears began to fall from her eyes now, and she lowered the shotgun.
“Look at me, Alice.” I said, and after she moved her hands away from her face, she did, “It’s the only thing you can do for him. It’s the only humane thing you can do.”
I understood those things suddenly. They were the result of a person being consumed by an evil that was older than their own race. The evil mutated their physical appearance and acted through them, terrorizing the living for reasons neither Alice nor myself knew yet. But although they were completely possessed, the original person was still alive somewhere. They were falling through the darkness that consumed them, being ripped and contorted and burned and eaten by it. The only way to save them was to kill the beast that held them firmly in its grip. I knew that just like Alice had known it after awakening from her sleep.
She raised the shotgun, and with tears running down her face, she whispered, “I love you, Dad.” Then, in an explosion of sound that ripped painfully through the dense silence, she fired the gun.
Thick, black liquid splattered onto my face, and I jumped away from the body before it turned back into her father. I wiped the blood from my face before it dripped into my eyes, listening to her crying softly as she grasped the creature’s clawed hand. After turning back around, I watched the hand turn quickly back into one belonging to a human.
“My mom told me. She told me I had to help him pass over. He was stuck inside of that thing!” She managed to gasp out through her deep, powerful sobs. I knelt down beside her, holding her head to my chest as she began to cry even harder.
“I had hoped,” She whispered. “A part of me thought that maybe he had escaped it. Either it had killed him… or he had gotten away. But I had hoped that if someone had to do it, that it would be me.”
“I know. I know.” I told her as she grasped both of my arms tightly.
“It was my responsibility… but he’s…” She laughed slightly, and I looked at her in shock. “I’m relieved, because he’s okay now. Wherever they are, our parents are okay, Quinn.”
I had known that, too. It was the only thought that could comfort us. People had been using the notion of “a better place” for centuries to console the living after their loved ones had passed to the land of the dead. Alice and I both didn’t know where that place was, but we knew it existed. Slowly, we were beginning to know things like that. The idea brought the comfort then that had evaded us for days.
“Do we have time to bury him?” She asked me softly. “I know you said we’re running out of time. But…”
I grasped her hand and kissed her.
“We’ll make time. Come on.”
***

We reached the launch site with exactly seven hours to go until the event. In order not to be caught in the middle of it, the ship would be departing Earth with two hours left until the great blast.
The launch site was something to witness, believe me. It reminded me of a tailgate party, though one with slightly more frightened-looking party-goers. Cars, trucks, vans, buses, and even one tractor trailer were parked on the hard desert ground, stretching back as far as my eyes could see. Alice and I watched as people meandered through the rows upon rows of cars, talking in different languages and carrying their bags.
“This would make for a cool essay, wouldn’t it? ‘Different cultures at the end of the world?’” I suggested to Alice, who just wrapped her arm around my back as we started walking.
“Even if you bring a charger, there isn’t going to be electricity, you moron!” One man snapped at another man.
A man was gesturing to the ship in the distance while trying to communicate with a group of Americans who were obviously very confused at his ramblings in a language they didn't know. One man opened the door of his car and pulled out two small dog carriers.
“All pets are being kept in the east side of the ship through lift-off.” A man in an unidentifiable uniform told him. “Did you bring their sedatives?”
The man nodded and started to explain, but our feet were carrying us forward still.
“This is going to be so much fun, sweetheart. It’s going to be like a ride at Six Flags!” A woman was telling her crying daughter as she hugged her tightly.
“This is crazy, Quinn.” Alice commented as she looked around.
“I know. It’s like every country has at least a few people here.” I replied, “I think that’s a good thing. It would be no fun if we got to Pangaea and there was no diversity, right?”
“I don’t think it really matters.” Alice replied, “I know you’re trying to keep things positive. But diversity on Pangaea should be the least of our worries.”
“What should we be worrying about?”
“Getting there in one piece. Remember what they said this ship’s nickname is?”
“How could I forget the comic book reference?”
“Of course; silly me.” She said, with a slight roll of her eyes, “‘The Flash’ is going to take us hurtling through space at a ridiculous speed. We’re going to cover an unthinkable amount of ground in two weeks. I just don’t think that if spaceflight travel was that advanced we never would have heard about it. It seems dangerous to me.”
“Do you remember what they said at the meeting? They kept this a secret, because it was all going to be unveiled in a big ceremony. But now they have no choice but to tell us. We’re all making this ship’s first journey with them. There’s something I forgot to tell you, by the way.”
“What?”
“They’re sedating everyone.”
She stopped walking and looked at me, her eyes blazing.
“How could you not have told me that?!” She exclaimed in fury, “No! Quinn, I am not being sedated! For all we know, they’re sedating us because we have to travel for like, one hundred years!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, wrinkling my eyebrows in confusion and stifling a bemused grin.
“Don’t give me that look like I’m being so dumb! Quinn, hello?! You’re the space nerd! Hyper-sleep!”
“This is not hyper-sleep! They're sedating us so we don’t all freak out while we’re taking off into space at thousands of miles per hour. I don’t want to be awake for that. Plus, they said it’s more like a cruise ship on-board than anything. Why would they make it look so nice on the inside if we were going to be asleep for so long? We’re only going to be out for the take-off. Allie, I promise, no one is trying to trick you into sleeping for one hundred years.” I grasped her hands, trying not to laugh. After a minute, she rolled her eyes and groaned in aggravation.
“Quinn, if I wake up, and my boobs are down to my knees…”
I couldn’t help it; I cracked up at that.
“You think it’s funny. But you’re the one who said you wanted to be with me forever. So, you have to deal with them.”
“I meant that, when I said it. So you’re right. See? Now I wouldn’t lie to you about this, because that would be unpleasant for both of us.”
“Yeah, it would.” She punched me lightly in the stomach. “Keeping secrets from me… Hyper-sleep with one eye open!”
She was trying to maintain the façade of being genuinely angry, but I could see the faintest trace of a smile as she turned away from me. I was laughing even harder now as I walked behind her, ignoring the irritated glances of the people I walked past. I’m sure they thought I was just a stupid kid who was too immature to understand the gravity of the situation. But I wasn’t just laughing because what she had said was funny. I was laughing because she was starting to show stronger signs of returning to the way she had been before the end had begun. In my heart, I knew that both of us were starting to grasp at a faint, distant hope that we were going to survive. We were going to have the life we had always dreamed of having. Whether it was on Earth, Pangaea or Pluto (the non-planet, so obviously, I’m kidding), we were going to be alright.

Violet

Brynna was frustrated. She was shaking her head slightly, taking long drags on her cigarette, and rolling her eyes. Maura, Penny, and I were standing on the cracked desert ground, watching her and James try to change the tire that had exploded as we drove. If James hadn’t had sufficient reflexes, the car would have swerved off the road.
“Well, maybe you should have checked them before we left! Aren’t men supposed to be the ones who possess all the expertise on automobiles? That is a fallacy, obviously!”
“Will you just be quiet?!” He snapped at her loudly, clearly beyond frustrated, “At this point, listening to you talk is like having a spiteful, condescending banshee screeching nonstop in my ear. If you’re going to stand there and complain at me, please, for the sake of all of us, be a little quieter about it.”
“I feel no need to mutter when I’m irritated, James.”
“Clearly.”
“Alright!” I snapped finally and jogged over to them, “Brynna, stop being…” I shook my head slightly, coming up short on a word to properly describe her behavior, so I settled on:
“...you. James, you have to hurry up. We’re running out of time.”
“I know. I’m getting there, Violet.” He hiked the car up further on the jack, and I knelt down beside him to screw in the bolts. “Thanks. Oh, look; someone else has brains in the family.”
“You are the most insufferable annoyance I have ever had the displeasure of meeting, James Maxwell.” Brynna snapped as she flicked the ember off of her cigarette.
The jack started to give beneath the weight of the car, but James, in an impossible show of strength and quick response, got below it before it fell. He knelt with almost half the weight of the car on his shoulders.
“Yeah?” He hissed as the exertion of forcing the car up rendered him hardly able to talk. “Right back at ya, sweetheart.”
“Would you two just stop it?!” I stood up after fixing the jack. “One minute, you’re arguing like ridiculous tweens who want to wear the same shirt. Then, you’re babbling at each other about the most stupid, ridiculous things. Bottom line: You two never shut up!”
“Excuse you, if you overheard the conversation that we had in the car earlier, you only heard it because we were operating under the assumption that you were asleep. I can also assure you that the aforementioned conversation was neither stupid nor ridiculous. Furthermore, please let me remind you, that if something is stupid, it is more than likely also ridiculous, so your statement has been rendered moot by redundancy. Finally, even if our conversation was meaningless or mindless, it was also none of your business.”
“We were in the same car. What was I supposed to do?”
“Listen to your iPod. Plug your ears. I don’t know!” She snapped, and clearly, her exhaustion was beginning to get the best of her. Maura and Penny came over to see what was holding us up. Brynna scooped Penny up and walked around to the back of the car where the trunk was open. I heard her pull open the cooler we had brought, talking softly to Penny all the while. Normally, her gentle nature was not exposed to strangers or even to Maura and me. Now that she was slowing, her body weighed down heavily with exhaustion and hunger, she couldn't hide it.
“Are you sleepy?” She was saying softly as she came back around where we could see her. Penny was eating a cheese stick while her head was rested against Brynna’s chest. “We are going over here to lie down while you figure out a solution to our little conundrum. You got us into it, James, though I have little faith that you can get us out of it as well.”
“Maura, make her stop.” James grunted as he pulled the bolts with all the strength he could muster in his own exhausted state.
“That’s enough, Brynna.” Maura replied dismissively.
Brynna was opening a cheese stick of her own carefully.
“I will walk away now. If I do not, I will surely throw this cheese-stick at his head.”
“She’s just being funny at this point.” Maura explained to James quietly as Brynna started to walk away.
“Really? I didn’t know she was capable of being funny. I thought she was only capable of foaming at the mouth.”
Maura and I both gasped when Brynna's half-eaten cheese stick flew through the air and hit James squarely in the side of the face. I snorted, trying to stifle my laughter. Though I was expecting him to jump up and start shouting at her, I couldn’t deny how funny it was that she had just used a dairy product as a weapon. Instead, of shouting, though, he turned his head and watched her walk away, grinning to himself before starting to laugh with me. The cheese stick had landed in his lap, so he picked it up and shoved the whole thing into his mouth.
“She’s something else, I’m telling you.”
“She is.” Maura replied with a sigh, “That’s kind, actually. She’s a right pain in the ass. But she is, as they say, my pain in the ass.”
When the car was finally running again, Brynna came over with Penny bundled up in her jacket. When I looked into my younger sister's face, I found that she had fallen asleep again.
“You need to wake her up, Brynna. If she sleeps now, she won’t sleep on the ship.” Maura told me.
“I will get her to sleep.”
“How? Are you going to knock her unconscious?” Maura asked impatiently.
“Do not make jokes with me. I am not in the mood. I will get her to sleep by simply...”
“They’re giving out sedatives for the lift-off.” James interrupted her, “It will wear off sometime after we’re in space.”
“Sedatives?!” Brynna snapped at him as she laid Penny in the backseat against me. “That’s not happening, James! I don’t even let her have non-organic juice! You think I’m going to let them drug her?!”
“What is the alternative?” James closed the door to block out the rest of the conversation. She was pointing at him, her eyes widened, clearly infuriated that he had kept that little secret from her. Finally, she threw her hands up and huffed to the car door which she opened and closed with gusto.
“Well, at least I know one thing for sure.” Maura spoke up after Brynna had sat back in her seat. “You two will never date.”
“What even made you think that was a possibility in the first place, Maura?” Brynna snapped irritably. A cigarette was burning away between the fingers of the hand she had rested on her face.
“I don’t know.” Maura replied calmly, “You’ve never fancied boys your own age. I thought you had decided to try someone a little older.”
“No. If I were going to date an older man, it would certainly not be that one. If one forces her gaze past his good looks, all one would see is a vexatious, arrogant plague.”
“I think that's a little harsh, darling.” Maura reasoned, still in that calm and cool tone. Her Zen attitude was obviously grating on Brynna's frayed nerves.
“No. It really is not. Please, by all means, forgive me if this is too harsh, but I think he is just about the most aggravating presence I have ever encountered.”
“I think you’re just tired and cranky.” I chimed in casually but with a condescending scorn to my voice that one would use when disciplining a very rambunctious, sneering child.
“I do apologize if the memory of the occurrence has slipped my mind, but did I ask you what you thought?”
“No, but I’m going to tell you anyway!” I shot at her after crossing my arms over my chest defensively. “This is a free country!”
“If on Pangaea we decide to split into countries, remind me to make ours a tyrannical regime so that I never have to hear that irksome sentence ever again. God or Gods, I hate when people say that.”
I watched her blue eyes find me in the mirror she had pulled down from the car's ceiling. I was shaking my head in disgust at how nasty she could be. It wasn’t just a matter of being intelligent. She wasn’t satisfied unless everyone was clear on the fact that she was smarter than they were. If they doubted her, she would tear them to pieces by reminding them that not only was she more intelligent in the present but that she was always going to be. It was how she kept everyone in their places.
There was a long moment of silence when James got back into the car and started it up.
“Do not talk to me.” Brynna snapped at him without any provocation.
“I wasn’t going to.” James replied calmly, but I saw him roll his eyes. Already, he was tired of her ridiculous personality quirks. He had to have sympathized with me; I had been forced to be in her company for seventeen years.
I shouldn’t say all of that. I did love Brynna dearly. She was my sister, after all. However, I can't lie and say that I didn’t contemplate holding her head under water for several minutes to stop one of her rants.
If I am going to be completely honest, I would say that I owed her. She helped raise me. When Maura had left us briefly, all of the responsibility fell on Brynna’s young, fragile shoulders. She never threw that time that she had cared for us selflessly in my face or used it to manipulate me. She just pretended it had never happened.
That was with me, at least. With Penny, she never stopped taking care of her. In fact, Penny spent more time at Brynna’s than she did at home with my mother, father, and me. I will never pretend that Brynna's influence on either of us wasn't what shaped our personalities for the better. Anyone who truly knew our family would be able to tell you that if we were left to be raised completely by our parents or even Maura, we would be in much worse shape, perhaps even irreparably damaged; I would go so far as to say that if it came down to being raised by our mom and dad or wild animals, the animals were the better option, hands down.
“Is your clock right?” Brynna asked James suddenly.
“Why wouldn't it be?”
“Because Daylight Savings Time was yesterday, and people tend to forget about it.”
“What?!” James looked at the clock, “Well, that's great. Why didn't you tell me that before?”
“I'm sorry, I assumed that you were in the ninety-nine point nine percent of the population that remembered something as simple as turning your clock back an hour.”
“That is enough!” Maura exclaimed from behind her hands. When she covered her face, we knew that her impatience with our annoying shenanigans was reaching a dangerous level.
“Well, we now have only three hours to get there.”
“Before they take off?!” I exclaimed in horror. Neither replied, so I knew that we were officially at risk of being left behind. I bent forward to rest my face on my knees, feeling a sharp jolt in my chest that I was all too familiar with. My heart was pounding like the drums carried by soldiers of some ancient war fought with swords and shields in the shadows of towering mountains. My chest constricted to smother my lungs before I could draw the breath that was needed to protest. My anxiety that had always been like an extra being I was painfully conscious of and incapable of exorcizing was rearing its head, and there was no worse time for it than right then.
“Do not have a panic attack right now, Violet! We do not have time!” Brynna snapped, but she turned around in her seat to check on me.
“I will handle this.” Maura told her irritably, “Just turn around and be quiet.”
“This is positively the worst night of my life!” Brynna put her sunglasses down and laid her head back against the headrest. “James, make haste.”
“I'm on it, darling.”
“Do not refer to me by a condescending pet name ever again.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I swear to you, James Maxwell, on every Bible, Qur'an, Bhagavad Gita, and L. Ron Hubbard book ever printed that if you so much as look in my direction, I will reach over and smash your head against the steering wheel until you are...”
“James! Brynna! That is enough!” Maura shouted over them. They both fell silent, but Brynna continued to scowl as she laid back with her eyes closed.
I kept my face on my legs, trying to steady my breathing the way Maura was instructing me to. She stroked my hair which soothed me slightly until finally, the worst of the attack had passed, and I was consumed by a sudden exhaustion. I turned slightly so that I could lay my head on Maura's lap.
God was merciful, because I dropped off to sleep again. My mind remained blank, lost deep in some vast expanse of nothingness so peaceful, I could have cried with joy. In that swirling blank space, I escaped the horror I felt at being left behind to burn on the earth with the unlucky.
***

Awakening from a deep sleep to find yourself even more exhausted than you were before the slumber is just about the most unpleasant, infuriating experience regarding the tendency of the human body to attack itself. I rubbed my eyes sleepily as my vision cleared; through the window that my face was rested against, I saw Brynna and James standing with my older brother, Elijah. I perked up upon seeing him, but the grogginess in my body never fully dissipated.
I looked next to me to find that the car was completely vacated. When I saw Maura and Penny hurrying towards the housing buildings of Elijah's school, I knew that Penny, as she always did, needed to go explore the bathroom. Why are children so fascinated with strange bathrooms?
I was getting restless and impatient. I was tired of being cooped up in the car. I knew that we were running out of time, and that made my impatience grow even more. I wondered when my mother and father would contact us, asking where we were. If Brynna was to be believed, they were already at the launch site and waiting for us to arrive with impatience of their own. I was so not in the mood for one of their lackluster lectures; their obvious apathy had always been very depressing.
“Well, you were smart to think that I wouldn't need convincing. You know me, with my fascination of all things apocalyptic, right?” I had cracked the window ever so slightly in order to hear their conversation.
“Wow, Brynn, you weren't kidding.” James told her, and I heard Brynna laugh airily.
“I didn't know that you thought I was.” She replied, “He's an Environmental Science minor, for the sake of all deities and Gods.”
“And my sister is a bit of an arrogant genius, in case you haven't noticed. But in reality, James, she talks like this to scare people like you off.”
“People like me?”
“Yeah. You're what the people in the old south would call a 'suitor.'” All evidence of playfulness in Elijah's voice had disappeared suddenly. Threatening seriousness stood in its place. The only person who held any sway over what Brynna did was Elijah. His opinion mattered to her more than that of anyone else because he was, as she described, her “intellectual equal, or close enough.” He was fiercely protective of her, even more so than he was over me or Penny. In high school, their mutual friends had joked that Brynna had a one-man, round-the-clock Mafia to keep their nasty male peers at bay.
James was now on the receiving end of the Mafia man's blunt weapon. I looked up cautiously to see Elijah glaring icily at him, his distrust and disapproval plain.
“I am most certainly not a suitor.” James told him calmly, “I just knew after I had that dream and met with those people that I had to find her. I don't know how I knew or why I had to bring all of you with me. But I knew that there was no getting around it. Not that I wanted to get around it, but I just knew that it was a certainty, do you know what I mean?”
“Not really.” Elijah replied, “But I was cool after you said you most certainly weren't a suitor. She's my little sister, and despite her vast knowledge on everything, she sometimes makes really stupid decisions. No offense, but dating a man twice her age would be the epitome of a stupid decision.”
“This is ridiculous, Eli.” Brynna snapped at him finally, “And if I decided to date him or anyone else twice my age, there would be nothing you could do about it.”
“Believe me, I know. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't kick that guy's ass. That's my job as your brother, right?”
“According to Maura, who is most certainly not the best judge of how to handle unsavory circumstances, is she?”
“Don't start getting on Maura already. Didn't you say you only just went home a couple of hours ago?”
“This conversation is over.” Brynna snapped before walking back towards the car. I jerked downwards and banged my head hard against the door.
“I already know you were eavesdropping, so you can stop pretending you're asleep. I know you quite foolishly think you are smarter than me, and I must encourage you to think again.”
I sat up, scowling darkly. Her fierce blue eyes, amplified by the thick black eyeliner and mascara around them, stared through the crack in the window at me. It was like looking into the eyes of some horrendous spectral creature from beyond the grave whose eyes could pierce your very soul. Or it was like looking into the eyes of an angry raccoon who was sniffing at something dead on the side of the road. It depends on how mad I truly was at that moment.
When Maura and Penny returned, we all squeezed back into the car. Elijah hugged me, and I grinned as I squeezed him back. He looked happier than he had the last time I had seen him. At that time, living with our parents in the midst of all the emotional baggage was wearing him down more than he was saying. While Brynna escaped to the city, Elijah escaped to college. I had hoped to follow the latter's path myself someday.
Of course, that wouldn't be happening anymore.
“So, I figured that Pangaea place was something. They said it could be inhabited by humans. And immediately, I pictured some sci-fi movie plot about humans trying to overtake it and farm it for resources.”
“Why does it have to be humans invading?” Brynna asked, “Why aren't the otherworldly creatures who live on Pangaea invading Earth?”
“That's been done too many times. How many Earth-invasion movies have we seen, dude?”
“We have seen many, most certainly. However, I find your insinuation that we would destroy another planet with no thought of the well-being of the natives residing there to be prejudiced and rude, quite frankly. It borders on betrayal of your kind, young lad.”
“Maybe so, but you know it would happen. Didn't you see Avatar?”
Off they went. They were speaking to each other on a channel the rest of us couldn't quite tune in to.
“Wait a minute, do you really think there's other life on this planet?” I interrupted them.
“As far as we know, there's nothing there but plants, water, land, and air to breathe.” James explained. “I suppose it’s a possibility. But after all the explorations they've already done there...”
“Whoa!” Elijah exclaimed, “They've done explorations already?”
“I told you that they were keeping secrets.” James answered.
“People have been on this planet already?” Elijah was practically bobbing up and down in his seat excitedly. “What was it like, man? Do you know all the details? This is my geek-fest right now.”
“Species: Homo-sapiens. Classification: Male Space Nerd. Reproductive Status: Non-existent, now and forever. Live long and suffer, young virgin.” Brynna narrated, and Maura, James and I burst out laughing. Elijah just stared at her, fighting a smile. I laughed longer than any of them, forgetting all about my previous irritation with her arrogance.
“I can't even come up with a sarcastic comment to counter that. Do you see what happens when I'm forced to wake up early? All of my knowledge and that entire education Mom and Dad are paying out of the ass for go right out the window.”
“Do you ever worry that it will never return? I know I sure do.” Brynna replied without missing a beat.
“I'm ignoring you from now until we get to the ship.” He was trying hard now to contain his excitement, even at just saying the word “ship”.
“Good luck with that.” James said dryly. “I've been trying to ignore her since about an hour after we met, and so far, I have been unsuccessful. She's a fiery, persistent little thing.”
“Excuse you, Mr. Maxwell, though I might literally be a thing, I do not appreciate being referred to as though I am simply an inanimate object. Fiery and persistent though I may be, I certainly do not grovel for your attention as you are making it sound.”
“Listen, crazy, it was a joke.” James told her as we all laughed somewhat cautiously at her irritation. “Sorry, let me rephrase that,” James kept his voice in its usual dull, sarcastic monotone when he said, “Crazed woman, thou art angered for naught. Thine intention was never to offend nor scorn your nonexistent feelings.” He looked at her. “I know you understood that, Ophelia. Now please, accept my apology before you go drown yourself in a river.”
“Oh, a Hamlet reference,” Brynna replied in mock awe, “Perhaps Shakespeare's second-best known play so congratulations; your knowledge on sixteenth-century literature is mediocre. Also, how can you compare me to the title character's mentally ill, pathetically devoted love interest? I am not waltzing around, handing out flowers to symbolize the impending demise of us all. If I were, we certainly would not be in such fine moods now, would we?”
“Give me your hand.” James told her austerely as he reached out to her.
“No.”
“Seriously. Give me your hand.” He insisted, “I'm sitting right next to you, and I can easily just take it but I'm asking politely. Come on.”
“Take my hand, and I will slap you with sufficient force across your smirking face, James.”
“Please?”
“No! Keep your eyes on the road before you kill us all.”
“Only if you give me your hand.”
She sighed and rolled her eyes in irritation. Then, she reached out her hand to him. He grasped it in one of his.
“Now look at me.”
“Your behavior is peculiar, to say the least. To say the most, you are beginning to, as Violet would say, 'creep me out.'” But she looked at him.
“Summon your inner Zen. Relax. James doesn't want to offend you. James likes you, though James certainly can't figure out why. Go to sleep. When you awake, you might begin acting like a twenty-two year old again. Right now, your tantrum is making me think that I need to immediately pull over and install a car seat for you.”
She snatched her hand away and smacked him hard on the arm as Maura, Elijah, and I laughed again, this time without fear of her reproach.
“Or procure a strait-jacket...” Maura added, and we only laughed harder.
“Chortle all you want, you contemptuous hyenas, but believe me when I say that the second this scourge of a man closes his eyes, he will cease to exist.” She looked over at him again, “Yes. That was a direct threat to your life. I will not kill you for your sarcastic commentary on what you perceive to be a show of immaturity on my part. I will kill you for referring to yourself in third-person. That kind of grammatical and conversational inconsistency is a capital offense in my world.”
“I'm sorry, honey. I zoned out about halfway through that.” James said after a minute. Maura and I were still giggling beyond control, but Elijah was beginning his return trek to Brynna's side.
“Alright, alright...” He said, holding up his hands to stop us. “Do you want me to kick his ass, Brynn? I will.”
“No, thank you.” She smiled at him, “Though you can surely hold him down while I kick his ass.”
“No ass-kicking is necessary. Hey,” James said, and Brynna looked over at him, “I'm sorry.”
“You are not sorry. Your apology is useless given that I have threatened your physical well-being. You are simply trying to avoid great pain.”
“Nope. You're wrong. I'm genuinely sorry.”
“Shut up, James.” She rested her head against the headrest and closed her eyes. Elijah reached over and patted her shoulder.
“You're a good sport, kid.” Immediately, he changed tracks in his mind. “So were there humans on the planet already?”
Brynna sighed, shook her head, lowered her sunglasses, and muttered about attention-deficit disorder. My eyes widened slightly when I saw James reach over and squeeze her hand tightly in his. I was right in the middle of the backseat and had been the only one between Maura, Elijah, and me to see him do it. My eyes moved to Brynna, who had turned her head to look at him. I expected her to snatch her hand away and scowl darkly at the fact that he had sought a human moment of warmth from her. Instead, she gazed at him uncertainly, as though she was genuinely confused about how to proceed.
“No. Just rovers, as I was told.” James answered, and I watched as his thumb stroked the back of her hand. “Sorry to disappoint you, man.”
Brynna's fingers locked around James's for just one quick second. Then, she pulled her hand away, crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes again. James smiled to himself and found my eyes in the rear-view mirror. Instantly, we both looked away, him trying to pretend that he had not touched her and me trying to pretend that I hadn't seen.
“That doesn't disappoint me at all! We will be the first human beings to set foot on this planet. Do you all have any idea what that means?”
“We'll be the first to die if it turns out the little computer on wheels was wrong about the oxygen level being plentiful enough to support human beings?” Brynna filled in quickly.
“No! It means that we'll be like...” He stopped, trying to form the right words to phrase what he was trying to say. His excitement was rendering him practically incapable of speaking. “This planet will continue to exist long after we're gone, and we'll have been the first people to ever set foot on it! We'll be myths! Old legends!”
“So?” I furrowed my brows in confusion. I finally broke my curious gaze away from Brynna and James. I would have plenty of time to contemplate whatever was emerging between them later. In the present, I was genuinely interested in whatever it was that Elijah was getting at.
“Yes, if you're suggesting that people are going to marvel in wonder at our very existence, I must, as they say, burst your bubble.” Brynna eyed him in the mirror. “While they might marvel, we will no longer be around to experience their worship.”
“It doesn't matter!” Elijah replied, and I watched Maura start shaking her head slightly as she tried to suppress a chuckle. “We'll be studied. We will be the reference group for whatever culture forms there. For thousands of years, people will talk about how everything started, and it will have started with us!”
“Your need to be discussed and revered is worrisome, Elijah Daniel.” Brynna informed him.
“It's immortality, Brynna!” Elijah exclaimed, “It's what everyone wants!”
“Well, though I agree that it is immortality in its own right, I sincerely doubt that all people yearn for an eternal life, physical or metaphorical.”
“Bursting his bubble, raining on his parade. You are a monster, Brynna Olivier.” James told her.
“Thank you! Somebody says it, finally.” Elijah replied, but he was laughing. “I know that you're secretly psyched about this, too, Brynn. You just want to act all aloof about it because you don't want to geek in front of James.”
“I would be more than willing to geek in front of James if I wasn't so very tired. Plus, I am still worried about the world ending sooner than we think. To be more specific, I am worried about it ending while we're still on it. Eli, I will make you a deal, right here and now, in front of all of you, the Council of the Toyota Prius. If we make it safely to Pangaea, I will gladly geek out with you.”
“I know you will. You don't have to swear anything, because I know that once we're on a different planet, you won't be able to contain yourself. You're as much of a nerd as I am.”
“I learned from the best, didn't I?”
“By 'geek', what exactly do you mean?” James asked. “You have to explain these ridiculous slang terms to old people like me.”
“Giggle, jump up and down, clap my hands. Behave like some puerile little child with ADHD who just downed a two liter of Mountain Dew. The whole nine yards, James.”
James laughed again, and Brynna smiled.
“We'll all be so thrilled to be alive that I'll be surprised if everyone doesn't break into a multicultural interpretation of the Thriller dance.” Brynna continued quietly after a minute. “That's if we make it, of course.”
“We'll make it.” James told her, and I gaped at them, my mouth open, and my brow scrunched together in confusion. One minute, they were screaming at each other. The next minute, they were clutching hands and reassuring each other gently that everything would be alright. If that was what being an adult was, then I wanted to remain a child forever. Relationships were too confusing in later years.
I shook my head slightly, deciding not to attempt an analysis of their ups and downs. Instead, I laid my head against Maura's shoulder. That time, when I fell asleep, it was peaceful.
***

Before I was even fully awake, I was running. As my mind resurfaced from sleep, I took note of Brynna and James running in front of me. James was carrying Penny and three or four bags. Elijah was hauling the rest. Maura was grasping my hand and pulling me along with her. Sleepily, I looked around as my legs carried me speedily forward; I noted rows upon rows of cars parked on the desert ground. They would be parked there until they burned with the rest of the world...
It was a strange thought that was as fleeting as a shadow in the corner of the eyes, but it chilled me deeply.
All drowsiness evaporated at the sight of the humongous ship that rose like a behemoth in front of us. It was a miracle of construction. It was a black and gray metal giant that boasted power, enough to send us hurtling out of the atmosphere and through space. I couldn't wait to see what it looked like on the inside. In one of her better moods, Brynna had described it as looking like a cruise ship. She reminded me of the cruise our parents had sent us on with Maura a couple of summers earlier. The memories of that vacation were enough to ease me through my most intense panic attacks.
I remembered that we had to be put under for take-off, and I felt the familiar pounding and painful tightness in my chest again. Before I could think about it, we were standing in front of a man who clearly knew James. He checked our names off of a list written in a spiral notebook and handed each of us a cup with one small pill in the bottom.
“One person has to stay awake in each party.”
“Why?” Brynna asked as we walked onto the ship. 
The door began to slowly close, and all of us, even the man who had checked us in, stopped talking and moving in order to see the last glimpse of the world we knew disappear. For a moment, after the door had closed and we were plunged into semi-darkness, we were silent.
“Why does one person have to stay awake?” 
James's voice snapped us all back to reality.
“Can we speak privately for a minute?” The man replied, and James and Brynna followed him promptly.
The man spoke to them quietly. As the conversation continued, I watched their facial expressions shift from slightly heightened curiosity to absolute alarm and in Brynna's case, alarm with a little rage mixed in.
“Are you kidding me?!” She asked in a loud, furious whisper. “James, none of us are taking that.”
“What are they talking about, Maura?” Penny asked as she rubbed her eyes.
“Nothing, darling. They're just talking.” Maura replied calmly. She was an ace at hiding any problem, big or small, from us. But I listened even more closely, needing to know what had James and Brynna in such a stir.
“How can you be giving people this?” James demanded furiously. “We never agreed on one particular pill, and the one we all came closest enough to agreeing on was nothing like this!”
“The meds said this is the only one that will keep people asleep long enough. James, I know it’s rough, man. But it's either take this with risks and all, or stay awake during a high intensity lift-off. The latter could have the same effects as the pill. Most people want to just take their chances and knock themselves out.”
“You are insane if you think I am giving this to them.” Brynna snapped at both of them. “Why would I? So one or all of us can have heart failure? What is the point? Well, dying in our sleep, or dying in a fiery explosion, I suppose. But I'd rather just not die! I'd rather no one die!”
“Look, this is why we have one person staying awake. They'll monitor the others, and if there is a problem, we have forty-two doctors on board who are also awake. As soon as we're level, they'll come right to you. The positives far outweigh the negatives, Ms. Olivier. I promise you.”
“Yes, let me trust the word of a man I have only just met.” Brynna replied sarcastically with her signature eye-roll. “They don't call me a genius to flatter me. I make more intelligent calls than that, thank you so much!”
“Brynna...” James grasped her arm and pulled her away from the man. As he talked to her quietly, he moved his hand down to grasp hers.
“No, because you said if they made you stay awake, you were going to have a fit!” Brynna spoke over him as he continued trying to reassure her. “I will stay awake and stare at all of you until my eyes bleed to make sure nothing goes wrong.”
“No,” James told her, “You won't be able to handle it, Brynna. You said so yourself.”
“I'll deal with it. I've dealt with worse. I'll force myself to deal with it.”
“I'm not going to make you do that for my sake.”
Her eyes met mine, and she lowered her voice back down to a whisper. I saw her hands shaking, and I knew exactly what she was saying to him.
“I can't take anything that puts me under, James. I can't do it.” I saw genuine fear in her eyes for the first time. She had always been a bit odd when it came to sedation, and I had never understood why. I was prone to sleepless nights where my anxious mind battled on until the sun rose. I was thankful for the existence of pills that ensured one mercifully quiet night of sleep.
“I'll stay awake.” James told her calmly as he moved his hands up to rest comfortingly on her arms. “If anything happens to anyone, I'll make all forty-two of the doctors come down. I promise.”
“I have to stay awake. I can't...” She trailed off, looking both thoughtful and terribly worried. When she resumed speaking, her voice was of its usual firm, unyielding tone, and her face had tightened up into its expression of nonchalance and arrogance. “We'll both stay awake.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. For my sake and theirs, I am staying awake.”
“But you said...”
“I know what I said. But I'll deal with it.”
Elijah shook his head slightly beside me and muttered, “She won't be able to handle it.”
“Why not? She's Brynna. If she can't handle it, she handles it, Elijah.” I was slightly irritated at his show of distrust in Brynna's resolve. She had never given him a reason to doubt her before. But I knew, even if I wouldn't admit it, that he was right. What we were about to experience was going to be traumatic, and despite her love for sudden bursts of adrenaline, she would surely have a fit mere seconds after taking off. Even the boldest of our kind would.
“She can barely handle planes, Vi. Don't you think this is just a little bit more intense?”
“It is, but she'll be fine. She wants to make sure nothing happens to us.”
“She won't do us much good if she's having a panic attack.”
“She won't be hurting us, either.”
“I'm going to talk to her.” Elijah said, but Brynna and James had already walked back over to us. When she glared at us both, our facial expressions dropped, and we were silent, knowing a lecture was coming.
“If you had continued to eavesdrop which, coincidentally, was quite rude to begin with, you would have heard that James has convinced me to allow myself to be sedated.” She turned a little bit whiter just at the word. “However, I will stress that if I walk away and am muttering quietly to someone, odds are I do not wish to be overheard. I will thank you to remember that in the future.”
Elijah and I looked at each other, all signs of our earlier disagreement evaporated as we smiled slightly. We were used to Brynna's intricate reprimands, and after years of hearing them, they still never failed to entertain. We followed behind her and James, who were leading us further into the ship. We walked up a set of metal stairs, our footsteps echoing eerily through the hollowed-out chamber that was the ship's basement.
When we reached the room where the first batch of people were going under sedation, I felt yet another wave of anxiety overtake me. To steady myself, I grasped Elijah's arm and allowed him to steer me over to one of the cots at the end of the room.
The bed was simplistic, with just a blanket, pillow, and sheet of wax paper covering the part that I would be laying on. It reminded me of the backroom of the nurse's office at school, where Miranda and I would go when we wanted a good nap during our most boring classes. Sometimes we slept, and sometimes we whispered quietly, only to be scolded by the nurse who had little tolerance for such nonsense.
With Miranda in my mind, I downed the pill, knowing that in a few moments, the sudden spike in my anxiety level would begin to decrease. Miranda's face would fade from my mind, and I would drift gently into an untroubled sleep. When I awoke, we would have arrived safely on Pangaea.
Pangaea. I thought that it would be the end of all our worries.
There was one colossal difference between the cot on the ship and those that I had laid on so many times in the nurse's office; five straps were being put across my body and tightened to a point that I almost couldn't breathe.
“Oh, I think not…” I heard Brynna exclaim, and my heart managed to start beating rapidly despite the swift attack of the sedative. Before I could process the fluttering in my chest, I had plunged headfirst into the deep grip of a drugged sleep.

Brynna

“No, no, no!” I exclaimed again as Elijah and James both tried to reason with me.
“Brynna, on planes, you can barely stay in your seat.” Elijah implored somewhat desperately. 
“That is because even after reading quite extensively on the science of flight, I still do not understand how or why such a fallible creation stays in the air. And while I am aware that this is the maiden voyage of this impossibly large ship, which is being flown an impossibly long distance, I also know that I have no other choice but to be here, lest I wish to burn to death. If this completely impossible thing falls from its path into open space, I will just have to hold my breath until I pass out, won’t I?”
“Think about it this way: Once you start having a panic attack, it's going to go on for as long as it takes for them to level the ship. That could be an entire day. Longer, even!”
“A fine rebuttal to my excellent argumentation.”
“That was not an excellent argumentation! You’re completely out of your mind! James, tell her she’s out of her mind!”
“Not a chance!” James replied emphatically.
“Very wise of you, James Maxwell. A level of wisdom which I did not assume you were capable of reaching.”
“Well, you know what they say about assuming.”
“James!” Elijah barked at him, “Be on my side here, man! You said yourself that she should go under!”
“Elijah, take your pill.” I snapped at him as my irritation began to give way to anger. The men in charge of the ship had wheeled in two chairs large enough to be called thrones. On them, there were many straps meant to keep us in place throughout lift-off. On the legs, giant suction cups would hold the chair to the floor.
I was mildly aggravated at the suggestion that I couldn't handle myself through a situation that, though it was quite fearsome, was just another hurtle in an already very frightening journey.
“Fine,” Elijah resigned in irritation of his own. “You're on your own, man.”
To show the “bravery” that I lacked, Elijah made a grand gesture of tipping the cup back like he was taking a shot of liquor; in the process, he expertly ingested both the pill and the water. I continued stroking Penny's hair, pretending that I hadn't noticed. I was losing my desire to fight with those people.
“We're running out of time. Make your decision.” Robert, the man who had checked us in, told me hurriedly.
“’Tis made, good sir.” I stood up with my eyes still fixed on Penny. Her cherub face was relaxed, and she was breathing softly. I covered my mouth as a tiny giggle escaped me despite the situation; she still snored ever so slightly the same way she had when she was a baby.
“Alright, you have to sit down, then.” I heard Robert's voice say, and my small smile disappeared in a blink. I stood up to find both he and James were staring at me. “We take off in two minutes.”
Two minutes, and the world that I had believed for all of my life to be the only one would be gone forever. I would never escape into the crowds of natives and tourists in New York City again or lie on a sunny Florida beach. I would never see another film in a crowded movie theater or tune in to a mindless sitcom on television. Humans had lived on that spinning planet for thousands upon thousands of years and everything, all of that history, was going to be gone in less than twenty-four hours. Every accomplishment of man, every war fought, every seemingly insignificant turn of events in our species' long, turmoil-filled history was gone. Every great book ever written, every wonderful film ever made, every newly invented convenience on which we had grown to rely would soon be erased. All of those things would only exist in our memories. If we were able to, we would provide our children with the stories of those old times. Every person would pass our mutual history to the generations that would come later. But what if vital aspects of it were lost to age and the failings of memory?
What if, as our time on Pangaea progressed, every piece of our old world was lost?
It seemed that every country had at least one group to represent it. Though conflict had emerged between allies and enemies alike in the years leading up to the event, we were all the same now. We were all just a hodgepodge grab-bag of survivors, making our mad dash for a world where we would start anew.
We were never going to be able to come back. The grandiose escape was a plan thrown together in the space of a few weeks. The outcome of the momentous journey was less than hazy; it was inconceivable. Some would call the situation “life or death.” I only saw the latter.
“James...” I muttered, but he was already standing in front of me. I reached out and grasped his arms to keep from collapsing. He held the cup with the pill to my lips, and I tilted my head back without protest. A huge gulp of water sent it sliding painfully down my throat. I knew that soon the drug would begin to weigh down every part of me. I knew that soon I would be closing my eyes for what very well could have been the last time...
“Oh, my God...” I put my face in my sweating palms for a moment, feeling a fear beyond anything that I had ever experienced prior to that instance overtaking me. Sedation always brought forth the trembling, terrified child in me. I could not relinquish control ever, not even for a blissful, thoughtless sleep.
The world I had known was hours away from ceasing to exist. We were headed to a planet we knew next to nothing about, where we would have to rebuild everything from the ground up in order to survive. As other people slept peacefully around me, their fears over the monumental journey and their guilt over leaving so many behind to perish held firmly at the corners of their dreaming minds, I felt every last excruciating bit of it all.
I believe that I should be excused for feeling such tumultuous emotions, given the circumstances.
I was aware that I was lying back on one of the cots. I felt James’s hand rubbing my arm gently as I snapped my eyes open every time they betrayed me by shutting themselves.
“Everything is going to be okay.” James was telling me softly. “I promise you, we're all going to be okay. Just go to sleep, Brynna.”
“James...” I said again as the dark claws of that sleep sunk into my skin. I had a second, maybe even less, to say what I needed to say. I felt sick as that pure terror began to calm into deathly silence like a beast shot clear through the heart.
“Just go to sleep, baby. Just close your eyes.”
With my last bit of strength, I managed to murmur the words to him that were so very weak and yet so very true, as well. There was no other reality besides those two excruciating words.
“I’m scared.”
He put his hand on my face and whispered the last words I would hear before losing consciousness:
“I know. I'll watch over you, Brynna.”
***

I was twirling through the endless starlit sky like a toy ballerina in a child's prized music box. In the distance, the moon shone as bright as a lighthouse's beacon leading ships mercifully to the steady land from raging seas. I wanted to pull myself through space to reach it. I wanted to find salvation on its surface. But the stars around me faded as I tumbled forward, projected towards a hollow, menacing black hole where our earth once stood. The black hole had consumed it, erasing it from view as though it had been a dubious mistake. Someone, more than likely our Creator, had furiously blotted out our precious Earth with permanent ink. And it was permanent, that absence, that blackness...
Or so I thought...
The next time I blinked, the planet had reformed before me in all its vivid brilliance. The blue oceans and the green lands were amplified ten-fold in my weary eyes. The sight took my breath away. I widened my eyes, my impulse to blink again becoming overwhelming. My eyes burned, and tears streamed down my face from the effort it took to fight that basic reflex. But soon, the pain became unbearable, and my eyes shut for but one millisecond.
When I could see again, the ambiance that I had only just seen had vanished, replaced by a horror so lethal that I felt my heart begin to split. I wanted to reach up, grasp my chest, and through some miraculous cure, aid my heart's return to its normal two-step. But the sight before me was too harrowing. I was being eaten alive by it from the inside out.
Fire had engulfed the world in several blasts. I could hear the screams of every last man, woman, and child as they ran for cover, only to be consumed by that wave of flame I had seen so clearly myself. I could see every person I ever knew, whether I had felt any semblance of affection for them or not, as they perished in the overwhelming blaze.
My mother did not even try to run. The flames had erupted, and she had stood firm, awaiting the moment they blasted her from this life to the next. I wanted to scream out to her, but the pain in my chest had reached such an agonizing point that I found myself unable to draw the breath it would take to warn her.
For the first time, I was sorry that I had left her. Tears of physical pain mixed with those of emotional torment fell as my arm jerked forward, reaching out to the image of her that was so clear, I thought I would be able to embrace her if I just strained myself to reach with enough effort and pain.
When the fire surrounded her and burnt her right before my eyes, I finally did scream. I screamed until I felt the blood pushing against the skin of my face. I screamed at my mother with fury, guilt, and sadness so strong, I knew that it would end me.
Over and over again in my mind, these words-- so meaningless, it seemed, so stupidly sentimental-- repeated:
“She carried you.”
I screamed louder. The idea of it, though it was all the aforementioned negative descriptions, jolted me out of my drugged sleep.
“It's okay. It's okay, Brynna. You're okay.” James was telling me. His hands were on my face as the screams continued to pour from me. Those panicked wails were the words I should have said to her. They were the protest that I never gave James when he told me I had to leave both of my parents behind. I could not form a coherent sentence. Only guttural, animal shrieks could tell those around me of my regret.
I allowed myself that moment. I allowed myself that vulnerability, because I knew that I was safe there with James. I allowed myself to feel something other than the normal disdain I had for my parents. I owed them a moment of grief as their moment of death came and went.
An earthquake had ripped through my chest, pulling my heart in two separate directions with a bottomless chasm of space in between. My cries of torment choked off suddenly, and I found myself unable to gather breath sufficient enough to clear my clouded mind.
It was the drug they had given me. I was the one who was having the side-effects when I had been so worried about everyone else. I watched as James shouted to someone. Two men in white coats were beside me, and one was ripping my shirt down the front. Even with the unthinkably horrendous pain in my chest, I still found the strength to reach over and hit that doctor hard in the face. My body was going into the defense mode I knew all too well. Despite the fact that a very small part of me knew that those two men were going to save my life, I was still horrified to be in such a vulnerable state with them in the room.
“Everything's going to be okay.” James was telling me softly as he held the hand that I had used to slap the poor doctor to his chest. When I went to strike out with the other, James grabbed that one, too.
“Look at me.” 
My eyes snapped over to him as a result of their own wish to be comforted by the sight of his face. I was calmed by his soft brown eyes, despite seeing the smallest traces of fear reflected back at me in them. When he spoke, his voice was steady. In his firm show of calm, he was able to soothe me with an ease I didn't quite understand. 
“I'm not going to let anyone hurt you, Brynna. I promise.”
My hands tightened around his as I felt two patches being secured to my chest.
I couldn't breathe. Everything was beginning to disappear in swirling clouds of black. Within those ominous clouds, I could see silver stars twinkling. They did not mystify or calm me; instead, they terrified me, because as they appeared, I realized that I was falling back into space where I would relive that blood-chilling moment when the entire world I knew disappeared in a blaze that turned everyone and everything to ash. I couldn't see it again. I couldn't breathe.
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
“Let go!” One of the doctors shouted at James. I grasped his hands even more firmly, and the doctor had to bark at him again before he finally wrenched them free.
When the jolt of electricity coursed through my body, I heard a deafening bang that I was sure had shattered my eardrums. The ringing that followed the deafening sound was the same as the one I had heard just before the blast. I was still on Earth. I was going to drown in the wave of fire...
BANG.
It was the blast. Why wasn't I burning?
It hadn't hit me yet. It was coming.
BANG.
There was more than one explosion. The flames would surely come barreling towards me with a force that would rip what was left of the air from my lungs as I struggled to take one last, sweet breath before I died...
Silence.
It was coming. It was coming.
“Brynna?”
So, God really was a man. I wondered what my eternal punishment would be for living with such hate in my heart; both Maura and my mother had promised to meet me in Hell. The condescension I felt constantly had been towards those I did not care to know. But the hate had always been reserved specially for the two people who had made me. Surely that was quite an offense, one worthy of a place in at least the first of the many fabled levels of Hades.
“Brynna?!”
Why did God sound so frantic?
“Come back to me, baby.”
...Okay?...
As my senses came back to me, I realized that I was not dead, nor was I being called “baby” by an anxiety-ridden higher power. It was just an anxiety-ridden James Maxwell. My eyes opened, and I found myself looking up into his worried face. I couldn't think of something witty to say that would assure him of my return to normalcy. I could barely process what had happened. My sarcastic nature and intelligence that were the partners in crime behind such snidely clever remarks were put on the far back-burner of my consciousness under the circumstances.
“You look horrible.” I managed to croak out as my hand came up to grasp my chest. There was very little pain there anymore. A few aftershocks rattled my bones, but they were mere flies compared to the beastly creature that had been the actual heart attack.
James smiled slightly and tilted my head back. He poured some water down my throat, and I managed to swallow it before I started to cough.
“Easy.” James said gently.
“What are you telling me 'easy' for? You are the one pouring it.”
“And she's back to normal in...” James looked up at what I guessed was a clock on the wall, “Forty five seconds. That has to be a record.”
When I went to sit up and found myself unable, James eased me up himself.
“You would not even know what to do with yourself if I wasn't getting on you about something.” I managed to whisper before smiling at him just slightly.
He smiled, too, and replied, “You're absolutely right.”
The memory of the awful dream (was it a dream?) that I had been having grasped my jugular and choked off my newly restored ability to breathe.
“Is it coming back?” He asked me. I could tell that he was forcing his voice to remain level.
I shook my head.
“I think I saw it happen. I saw the blast.” My voice was trembling slightly as I told him the details. “I saw my parents, and I felt...” I shook my head, stopping myself. I could not bear to relive it all again. “I don't feel it anymore. But I felt it then. And it was so strong and so...”
Without thinking about it, I reached out to him and grasped his arms, pulling them so that they were encasing me. Then I wrapped my own around his neck. That gesture showed more weakness than I could stand, and immediately, I went to pull away. But his arms stayed locked around me as we laid back on the small cot. I was beneath him, embracing him so his body was pressed to mine. The urge to push him away was rivaled by an equally strong urge to hold him close. The two desires fought valiantly, but the latter won when I looked up at him.
But I had to pull away. I had never needed a man before, and I certainly did not need one now. I especially didn't need him. Since the moment we had met, he had purposely aggravated, insulted, and angered me, all in an effort to put me in my place. The concern he was displaying just then was meant to manipulate me into feeling a strong level of affection for him. It was also meant to make me shed my self-calming capabilities in favor of a dependence on him. He was holding me and gazing at me so warmly because he wanted to engage in a physically intimate act of carnal eroticism. Then, after he had gotten what he wanted, I would never see him again.
That was what Maura would have told me, if she had been awake.
I had to pull away.
But I couldn't do it. In the event of that near-death experience I had suffered through, I had no choice but to show vulnerability, as my desire to survive far superseded my need to remain unfazed by any passing terror, be it big or small. But I did have a choice in that moment, and I needed to move away from him and force myself to face that horrible vision I had seen on my own. I faced everything on my own, and I certainly couldn't afford any cowardice then, not even when it made me feel, once I managed to look past the blinding reservations I had about it, so safe and almost loved.
Though I knew that I needed to pull away, I found myself holding his arms around me, my body shaking as those horrifying images played out clearly in front of my widened eyes.
I was still very afraid.
After planting a gentle kiss on my forehead, he turned us both sideways so that he could lie behind me. I felt the scratchiness of his unshaven cheek as it rested against the side of my face. I squeezed him tighter and whispered softly so no one could hear but him:
“Stay with me.”
I felt his lips press softly to the side of my face now.
“I will.”
***

Forcing myself to remain conscious for the previous day and a half had taken its toll on me. I collapsed into another deep sleep despite my body's fight to remain awake. I couldn't stand to see what I had seen again. As I drifted off, I prayed that my chilling nightmare would be kept at bay by James's strong, comforting presence.
The dream never reemerged. I can thank him for that, because every time I began to see that darkness, I heard his voice telling me that everything was alright, and it faded. Within an hour or so, I heard another male voice, this one amplified to a point that it jerked me out of my mercifully serene sleep.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are level.”
I rubbed my eyes and turned over to look at James, who was still lying beside me on the cot.
“How was the take-off?”
He laughed softly.
“Awful, as I expected.”
“I figured as much.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why don't you try to sleep?”
“I can't. Not now.”
“Your body is going to crash sooner or later. You might as well just sleep now while everyone else does the same.”
He smiled slightly and sat up. I was alarmed by his appearance now that I was studying him closely. His eyes were surrounded by dark circles, and their lids were starting to swell slightly. A day and a half ago, he had been somewhat toned and almost healthy, but now, he was beginning to take on a sunken-in appearance that would have distressed any medical professional. I believed myself to be the most detrimentally afflicted by our mad dash to the ship, but the stress of the journey had taken the highest toll on him.
As though he had read my mind, he said softly, “You look as bad as I do.”
“Well, thank you so much for pointing that out.”
I wasn't angry at the suggestion that I was looking less than my already lackluster best; I just had no other retort. That was the most convincing evidence that I was still feeling the effects of the sleepless days.
“Do you know where my glasses went?” I asked as I looked around for a bedside table where he might have placed them. Instead of a table, though, I found that they were safely stowed in the breast-pocket of his button-up shirt.
“You might have to clean them. During the take-off, I was sweating so much that they're probably soaked.” He looked at me and said in a deadpan, emotionless voice, “Sorry.”
I found myself covering my mouth as I chuckled softly. His mouth cracked into a small, crooked grin.
“You think I'm kidding, but I couldn't be more serious.”
“That is so very gross.”
His smile grew.
“I really am sorry, all joking aside. Let me see them.”
I handed them over and watched as he cleaned the lenses on the end of his shirt.
“You only slept for an hour.” He informed me.
“I know. But I slept for quite a while when I was under the influence of that drug.”
I looked over at Penny, Maura, Violet, and Elijah, all of whom were still sleeping peacefully.
“Don't worry about them.” James said. He breathed on the lenses and wiped them again.  “The doctors said that if anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”
I nodded and stood up, my legs feeling heavier than usual. Every step was like attempting to stride quickly through waist-deep water. I almost felt like I was succumbing to some high fever as the malaise made itself known so strongly. I put my hand to my head and sat back down.
I was momentarily stunned to find myself on the verge of tears.
“Lay back down, sweetheart.” James told me, but I shook my head. When I had moved my hands away, my eyes had traveled to the far end of the room, where I could hear someone sobbing. One of the doctors was covering a middle-aged man with a sheet. A woman, presumably his wife, was standing beside him, crying into her hands.
“What am I going to tell the kids?” She asked no one in particular.
James and I stared at her, neither of us sure exactly how to proceed. I had never been skilled at consoling people, as outpourings of emotion made me literally squirm in discomfort. I looked at James finally to find that his eyes were traveling through the huge, heavily-populated room.
“Ten other people.”
He was right; ten other people were covered with sheets. Ten families were going to be grieving the loss of their loved ones before we had reached Pangaea. Ten families were going to rue the day they had decided to come aboard the ship to escape the end of our world. It would have been easier to just die together, they would say. That's what I would have said, if I had lost anyone.
Ten families. And that was only on our floor.
“They chose to come. They knew the risks.” I said softly to James.
He only nodded in response and grasped my shoulder.
“I want to go somewhere else, James. I cannot bear to see this.”
He nodded again and followed me as I strode across the room. I reached out to grasp a nonexistent handle on the door only to jump back in surprise when it slid open on its own. As we walked past the sobbing woman, we averted our eyes.
There was a loud humming in the hallway. Our way was illuminated only slightly by the dim overhead lights. We walked side by side, neither of us having the energy to keep up a quick pace or engage in conversation.
We climbed a flight of stairs and walked past a door marked “Housing Compartment 3.” There must have been another room full of sleeping survivors on the floor from which we had just come up. Finally, after several more flights of stairs and several more housing compartments, we reached a door that read “Atrium.” When James opened it for me, I was unprepared for the sight that was suddenly before my eyes.
It was exactly like a cruise ship. The floor was marble, and the walls were painted a cheerful blue. There were two staircases leading to an upper level that looped around the entire circular room. At the far end of the vast, open space, there were several sofas arranged around one spectacular floor to ceiling window.
One thing that had always befuddled me was the fact that while gazing out of the window of a moving plane, I could never tell that we were going several hundred miles per hour. Now, we were hurtling through space at a rate ten times the velocity of a simple airplane, and yet we were gliding along almost effortlessly. As James and I stood looking out of that window, we could barely tell we were moving at all.
The nerd in me was awakened as we stared at the lights outside the window. I suppose that space has weather as distinguishable as Earth's did, but in space, the clouds are not dingy and gray the way ours looked when rain is coming. Light purples and blues were the norm, as they say, up there. The stars twinkled in the distance around us; we were still not close enough to touch them.
People were starting to emerge from their housing chambers to explore. A collective gasp of several onlookers sounded behind us, but James and I were scarcely aware of it. The view outside the window was something no man had yet seen, and there we were, the first of the civilians on board to see it.
As people started pushing to get a look out of the window (a child actually pushed through my legs to get in front of me, the little heathen) James grasped my hand and pulled me away. But as we walked, we craned our necks to continue looking, hypnotized by the rare, mystifying beauty of that scene outside.
Large crowds always made me nervous, and the atrium was slowly filling to the brim with people. Though the room was exceptionally large, the walls seemed to shrink, closing in on us and giving little time to escape. Luckily, we pushed through another door and found ourselves walking through a wide corridor. Tables adorned with potted plants and decorative vases were spaced evenly apart along both walls.
“Seems a bit strange, doesn't it?” I asked James after a moment as we continued to stroll along with our hands clasped together.
“What?”
“This was a means to an end, correct?”
“Means to an end of what?” He stammered for a moment. “What are you even talking about right now, woman?”
I smiled, and he did, too.
“You must be exhausted, because after two days of conversing, I know that if you were feeling your best, you would have picked up exactly what I was talking about the moment I said it. But since you don't seem to be grasping it, let me explain myself further.”
Normally, I spoke so quickly that a less intelligent person would find themselves lost after just a few words. But with my body so heavily weighed down by the same exhaustion that I was accusing James of succumbing to, I spoke so slowly an eavesdropper might have assumed I was intoxicated.
“This ship was meant to transport a large group of people from Earth to Pangaea. That was its only purpose. And yet...”
“Let me stop you now, because I know that you're getting ready for one of your monologues.”
“Please do because quite frankly, I am too exhausted to continue but very interested in the answer you are going to supply to my query.”
“How are you even still forming sentences like that?”
If I had not been so tired, I never, even under threat of bodily harm, would have said what I said next.
“Because you are holding my hand, and despite my fatigue, I am still over-analyzing what that might mean. As a result, I am attempting to scare you off.”
We stopped, both needing to rest on one of the loveseats at the end of the hall. He was looking at me, but my eyes were darting around, searching for anything else to focus on. In fact, if one of the breathtakingly hideous Reapers were to be standing in the hallway with us, I would sooner look at it than at James's handsome face in that moment.
My eyes burnt at the sight of the clashing colors of paint on one of the aforementioned decorative vases. I had always hated green and yellow together, and if the painter of that particular vase had walked by me, I would have allowed myself just a single outburst of strong feeling in order to promptly slap him in the face for creating such an atrocity.
Those are the things that I thought about when I was avoiding a particularly unpleasant emotion.
Another moment of that heavy silence was going to kill me faster than the heart attack I had experienced earlier.
“Are we sitting because we're tired, or because you want to have a heart-to-heart? Because, though I am tired, I will force myself to run if you begin a conversation on feelings. I don't like them. I have no use for the ones I have, and that is why they remain repressed, always. And...”
“You are so strange, Brynna.”
I looked at him finally. I had looked at him, even into his eyes, many times before, but I had never noticed them to be so brilliant. Violet was jealous of the fact that Penny and I were the only children with blue eyes, and I had always joked that we were special, as we possessed the recessive gene, and she and Elijah were boringly plain, because they possessed the dominant. Penny and I would always be the unique ones, and they would always be ordinary. A part of me wasn't kidding. But James's eyes, though I had originally thought them to be the same dark brown as most other people's, were deeper and more beautiful than I had ever cared to notice before.
No, my rationality screamed at me, Stop looking at him. He's a man, which makes him dangerous, and you do not need human contact. You do not need human contact.
“You are quite possibly the strangest person I have ever met.”
There was another long moment of silence, and I closed my eyes, shaking my head slightly as I said, “I don't even know what you want me to say to that.”
“You don't have to say anything. I know that's new for you.”
“Are you being condescending right now?”
“That did sound condescending. You're right. What I mean is that I know it's hard for you to always come up with something to say for yourself and the people you care for. If you don't know what to say, you don't have to say anything. I won't be offended.”
I looked at him now, smiling slightly, before nodding. I had never allowed myself to remain quiet on anything. At first, I spoke to avoid being overlooked. Then, I spoke to defend my sisters and brother. After that, I spoke to scare people away. It was exhausting to live without a moment of quiet.
“Of course,” He smiled again, “If you do have something to say, I love hearing it. You might drive me absolutely insane sometimes with it, but that doesn't mean I don't want to hear it. Plus, I know that you're going to make it heard whether I like it or not. You'll make it heard whether anyone likes it or not.”
“I will.” I replied, with a very slight laugh.
“Wow. I am so used to the scowl that I am shocked to see you laugh.”
“You've seen me laugh before.”
“You always cover your mouth when you laugh but that time you didn't.”
“So it seems I am not the only one who analyzes everyone with whom I come in contact.”
“No. If I'm going to be honest, I am fascinated by you. You're just,” His brows furrowed slightly in genuine awe and slight confusion, “Strange.”
“Should I be offended by that?”
“No. Definitely not. It's cool, actually. I mean that. It's kind of amazing.” He shook his head back and forth quickly for a second and then said, “I am very tired. I would never be saying all of these things if I weren’t so tired.”
“I'm tired, too.” I looked at him again. “James, I should be telling you that we need to put distance between us. I should be telling you that this is all wrong. You're older than me, and I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I hurt people, sometimes on purpose. Every person I have ever known has been hurt profoundly by me at some point. I have let them move closer to me at times just so I could push them away later. Violet, Maura, and Elijah will never recover from what I put them all through, just by being who I am.” I stopped talking because the exertion was beginning to wear on me. It wasn't just the act of speaking that was weighing me down faster than I could fathom but the actual words. What I was saying had never been admitted out loud, but the words spilled out of me, sensing that this was their first and last chance to be heard. I finished the rambling admittance with what was the most candid, most painful confession of all:
“It’s true what they say about me. I am a toxic human being.”
He reached out, put his hand on my face, and leaned closer to me. Our eyes stayed locked together, and his other hand stayed wrapped around mine.
“You're not.” He said softly, “You're one of the best people I know.”
I couldn't help but laugh bitterly.
“You must be exhausted...”
“I am. But that doesn't mean I'm not right. Do you want distance between us? Tell me, and you'll have it.”
I leaned forward, my eyes closed now, and pressed my forehead to his. My hands rested on either side of his neck, and I felt his grasping my face still. There, in that moment, I knew that I had to face the unknown. I had to carry every burden of my family in order to keep our lives moving. It was a task too great and too terrifying to realize suddenly, but I did. In response to his question, I shook my head.
As we faced what was ahead, I knew, more surely than I had known anything else in my life, that though my logical brain was telling me that he must be pushed away, my heart was begging me to keep him. I needed James Maxwell more than I had ever allowed myself to need another human being in the entire span of my existence. 
The thought of having him anywhere else but by my side was one that I could not bear. So, I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face there, still shaking my head. As usual, I tried to pull away immediately but was able to stop myself.
I needed him. The thought made my heart flutter, but it also made me sick.
***

“Where have you two been?!” Maura exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air the way she always did when she was more than substantially irritated. “We woke up. You’re both gone. They’re wheeling people out of here covered in sheets.”
“How many?” James asked.
I walked over to kneel down beside Penny, who was sitting up and drawing in a great yawn.
“There were seven that we saw. Who knows how many?” Elijah replied, “So, what happened? Do you think the drug really did kill people?”
“I am sure it did.” I replied dismally. “It almost killed me.”
“What?!” Maura exclaimed, even more loudly than she had before. Within a second, she had stormed up to me, grabbed my face tightly in both of her hands, and began staring into my eyes as though she’d be able to assess my health by glaring at me. “What happened?!”
“It was mild, according to the doctor. Please don’t worry yourself over it.” I replied emotionlessly. After shaking her off, I sat down next to Penny on her bed.
“Are we in space?” She beamed brilliantly up at me, her blue eyes that were identical to mine gleaming with girlish wonder and glee.
“We are.” I said with a smile of my own. “Do you want to go see something cool?”
“You still haven’t told me exactly what happened, and you’re not going anywhere until you do.” Maura snapped at me furiously. The placid, gentle joy I had felt as I spoke to Penny disappeared without warning, leaving an uncomfortable, black void that left me cringing almost visibly.
“Maura, it is not even a big deal!” I shot back at her angrily. My outburst was unwarranted and practically inarticulate, considering how normally, when I dealt with strong emotions, I did so with poised sentences, as I am sure you have gathered.
Who was she to demand an explanation? Why was she, quite suddenly, so concerned about me?
“It was a heart attack.” James answered with a touch of irritation poisoning his reassurance. I did not know towards whom his hostility was directed. 
“It was very mild, and the doctors said she should have no lasting side effects from it.”
“Your heart has always been fine.” Maura replied instantly. “She’s twenty two. How could she have had a heart attack?”
James shrugged slightly.
“Because it was caused by the sedative. They had to get something together quickly that would be powerful enough to knock people out for the amount of time it took to level the ship. Given how rough the takeoff was and how quickly we were moving, they had to have something to keep everyone calm. You know that the old, safer stuff that could do that isn’t exactly easy to get these days. Not even the doctors on board had access to it; their clearance wasn’t high enough. They didn’t worry too much about the side effects of the one they gave everyone.”
“We can see that!” Maura continued, much to my growing offense. “Now, at least seven people are dead!”
“The world was going to end. They did not exactly have time to let the FDA screen the drug.” I huffed irritably.
“Would you just relax?” Violet snapped at me, “God! Did you sleep at all?”
“Yes, I did, thank you so much. Just because I slept doesn’t mean that I am not still suffering through some mild irritability at being asked asinine questions. Come along, Penny.” I grasped her hand, and we strode ahead of Elijah, Maura, Violet, and James.
“Just ignore her. She’s just in bitch mode.” I heard Violet mutter to Maura softly.
“Profanity is the weapon of weak-minded men, or in your case, girls.” I called to her over my shoulder.
Violet exclaimed in contentious exasperation, but I heard Elijah chuckling to himself.
“Don’t encourage her!” Violet snapped at him.
James stormed up to Penny and me. When his hand grasped my upper-arm roughly, I immediately snatched it away and frowned at him dangerously. His earlier belligerence in the conversation had been directed towards me, I discovered, though I could not have cared any less.
“You know, you really should go easy on her.” James muttered to me quickly. Perhaps if he had merely suggested that I take a more agreeable approach in regards to my association with Maura, I might have taken his thoughts into consideration. I might have even followed his guidance on the matter. Instead, his tone was harsh, demanding... I would not be told what to do by any man but certainly not by one I had only just met. My frown darkened to a lethal scowl that I thought would scare him away.
“Yeah, I know that look.” He nodded and furrowed his brows in a show of condescension that was sure to earn him a harsh kick between the legs from me. “It's not scaring me. Listen, I know this is tough for you. But it’s tough on everyone. You are acting like a spiteful child right now, and it needs to stop.”
Already, my resolve to refrain from ever making true, civilized human contact was overtaking my need for attachment. The former was stronger than what I had assumed was a basic, chemical need for James Maxwell. Ordering me around was certainly not helping his case, either. In fact, his sudden embrace of an abusively coercive disposition proved what I had so long believed about all men: Once they believed that they had a woman under their spell, their entire being changed. They had to feel as though they were totally in control by whatever means necessary.
Sometimes I thought of myself as a soldier on the front-line of defense. Consider it idealism or perhaps even a delusion far beyond grandeur, but I believed that it was my duty in life to guard not only myself and my sisters from the advances of men like James, but to inform all women, young and old, on the ways to recognize and successfully (albeit figuratively) dispatch a man who hid his beastly nature behind his handsome face.
That's what I thought when I was young, anyway. Yes, I was that type of feminist, I am sorry to report...
I glared at him in scornful silence before clearing my throat in irritation.
“James, just because I embraced you does not mean you can now tell me what to do. Do not assume that because you witnessed a moment of weakness in me that I am now suddenly at your command. Resist your nature as a male, please.”
“I figured that was coming.” James told me, without missing a beat. “So, you’re back to normal. You’re back to being a nasty, arrogant, bitch right? I know that's your thing. We’re back to that?”
I smiled at the thought of sticking a pin in his now laughably large ego. He had managed to weaken me momentarily when we were in the hallway. He had exposed the human being beneath the machinery for a second in time. Now, he gave himself undeserved credit for accomplishing what others believed to be an impossibility. The one moment when I had foolishly allowed myself to drop my guard, even if it was only slightly, was a victory for him, because he had done what so many others had tried and failed to do in regards to conversational and emotional intimacy with me.
I was partially responsible for the lapse in my judgment. But he was mostly to blame. Suddenly, I hated him for it. I was keen on self-loathing in those days, so I hated myself as well. However, I was also keen to passing the buck, as they say, and so, James received the brunt of my reproach; he had not given up his quest to expose my inner fragility until he had succeeded.
Because of those things, I would put both him and myself in our respective places.
“Tell me we’re back to that, Brynna.”
“We were never anywhere else, James.”

Quinn

“Quinn? Quinn, wake up!”
When my eyes shot open, they watered in the harsh light that was casting Alice's face in shadow.
“Is it back? Is the thing back?” I asked through slurred speech as I sat up quickly. “Whoa…” My hand flew up to grasp my head that was suddenly spinning in complete circles. “What’s going on?”
“It’s okay.” I felt Alice’s arms around my neck and her lips press to mine. “We made it. But it happened. We’re here. But it’s gone. Everything is gone, Quinn.”
Her face was buried in my neck, and I felt her tears as they streamed from her eyes.
“Did you see it, too?” I asked her, feeling my hands trembling as I held her tightly. The familiar smell of her hair and the feeling of her body pressed to mine remedied the horror I still felt at witnessing the end of the world in my dreams.
She nodded and stammered out, “But… but… The ship leveled out. We’re alright, baby. They said we're going to make it...”
I pulled away to look her over, making sure that she really was alright. Nothing about her appearance gave me reason to be alarmed, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Her hands flew up to grasp my face as she kissed me. We fell back on my cot, kissing passionately, prompting everyone to turn and look at us, some in disgust and some in admiration. After we had broken apart, I watched a guy in his twenties pump his fist in the air triumphantly when I looked at him.
“It's love, man! It will keep us together!” He exclaimed, and because we knew he was just goofing off, we found ourselves cracking up despite the horror we still felt in our chests over what we had seen.
“Let’s just be happy right now that we’re alive, okay?” Alice asked as she kissed me every couple of seconds. “Let’s be sad later.”
I looked into her green eyes and nodded.
“We’re here. We’re together.” I told her, and I couldn't help but smile slightly. “You’re right. We need to be happy about that, especially after everything that's happened.”
Her smile emerging suddenly at what I had said was all the affirmation I needed.
“Let’s go see the ship. People have been talking about how awesome it is.” 
She pulled me up, and once I was on my feet, we were hugging again, laughing to ourselves for no reason at all. The world had ended, and everything we knew was gone. But there was, admittedly, a certain excitement at having survived. It wasn’t a matter of boasting in the faces of the dead. Every human has the basic instinct to survive, and we had. There was no way we couldn’t celebrate our lives being spared, even if we didn’t understand why we had been so lucky.
Our hands were clasped together as we hurried out of our housing compartment on the third floor.
“The lady next to me said that we have to go upstairs. She said it’s amazing!”
We were running up the stairs, laughing like children in the midst of escaping from school for a day off. When we threw open the door with the word “Atrium” printed boldly across, we were stunned into silence. Even our gleeful laughter was rendered inert.
We walked forward in a daze, our mouths open in awe. Outside of the window was a display so fantastical, it was worthy of a place in some medieval fairy tale. Lights were swirling and glittering, the stars around them twinkling in the distance. The window from floor to ceiling allowed us to see perfectly this spectacular array of colors and shapes that flew past us at a speed we could not even begin to fathom.
Alice looked at me as we stood with our faces to the glass and mouthed, “Oh my God!” We were both laughing, unable to shake the joy we felt so strongly without apology or excuse. When her fingers linked with mine, my grin only grew wider.
“I could stand here all day. Can you believe this?” I asked her.
She shook her head, her eyes still wide in disbelief at what we were witnessing. In that moment, I felt truly lucky to have survived. Our reward for all we had suffered was that sight seen by so few. It was that childlike amazement we felt.
We stood for several minutes, staring until our eyes watered. We couldn’t imagine tearing ourselves away. But then, our curiosity at what other wonders the rest of the ship held overtook us, and we turned to leave.
“Do you think they have a Ben and Jerry’s stand? If they do, this would pretty much be the coolest ship ever.” Alice told me, and we both burst into hysterics again.
After walking through a hallway lined with vases and flower pots, in which we passed a very tired-looking man and who I assumed was his equally tired-looking daughter (though the way they were embracing was a little weird, if my assumption was right), we walked into a large room with a ceiling made of glass. There were hundreds of tables on the hardwood floors. It looked like a dining room at a vacation resort; the tables were wooden and adorned with flowers in small crystal glasses. Running along the left wall was a buffet stand that was emptied and dark.
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing they were building this thing for uppity morons.” I told Alice, who beamed.
“Only the best for them, I suppose.” She agreed with a roll of her eyes. “Well, now it’s for us. I mean, look at this!” Her voice echoed around the room as she spun in a circle while walking. “Look up!”
I did, only to see the stars whizzing past us through the window overhead in an impossibly fast blur.
“Do you have any idea how fast this thing is going?” I asked her, “I mean, how much money did they spend for this?”
“Not our problem, baby. Don’t think about it.”
“I know it’s not our problem. At least, not anymore. I mean, I have to admit that I find it kind of funny that they couldn’t escape even the apocalypse unless they were riding in style.”
“I know, right? If someone told me I had to fly in a rocket made from a Spot-A-Pot, I would have done it.”
“Oh, gross! That's so nasty, babe...” I said, but I was doubled over from laughing so hard.
“I knew you’d like that one.” She told me after walking back to grasp my hand again. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek.
When we left the dining hall, we walked through what looked like a large sitting room straight out of the Titanic.  After that, we discovered a library. Then, we discovered a recreation room. Set up throughout the spacious area were televisions, several pool tables, and through a door in the back, a large, empty swimming pool.
“That’s a lot of TVs.” I told her as we stared. “But definitely not enough for five-thousand people. ‘I want to watch Transformers!’ ‘I want to watch...' I stopped, screwing up my face as I tried to think. “God, what's a girl movie?”
“The Notebook, Runaway Bride, oh!” She snapped her fingers when she remembered another one. “Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, Flashdance... That’s some of the 80’s ones, and I haven’t even mentioned anything with Molly Ringwald yet…”
“Okay, okay...” I waved my hands to stop her. “Please stop. If you cut me right now, I'd bleed pink after listening to that.”
When she laughed that time, she fell back onto the couch and covered her face. When she recovered, she held up the tape that was in her hand.
“Fine, baby, I can fix that problem for you. Superbowl XLVI.”
“Shut the…” I walked forward and took the DVD from her hand when she outstretched it to me. “They have football, too? Allie, I now know for sure that everything is going to be okay.”
“Except for the fact that people are going to get knifed over movies, which is what you were insinuating earlier."
“I guess we’ll just all have to learn to share. Isn’t that what you used to tell your kids at work?”
“Yes. What, do you think I’m going to be a Preschool Teacher’s Aide here, too?”
“People will probably start acting like little kids over movies, so yeah. I hate to break it to you.”
“Never! I told you, I will never do that again. If anyone gets into a fight over whether to watch football or baseball, I am staying out of it. There’s nobody to tell me that I have to break it up. That’s something that I am not going to miss, I’m telling you.”
“What? Working?”
“Yup! Are you going to miss fixing cars on the weekends?”
“Hell no. Isn’t that why people are fascinated with the end of the world? They know that they don’t have any responsibilities except the most basic ones anymore.”
“I know I’m excited about it. I mean, yeah, we’re going to have problems. But I just have this feeling that everything is going to be alright. It’s not because we have football DVDs. It’s just…” She looked up at me. “I know it. The same way we’ve known everything else so far.”
I smiled and kissed her quickly.
“I know it, too. We deserve it at this point, don’t we?”
“Definitely. After what we just went through, we deserve to have it easy from now on.”
Consider us young, naïve, and entitled, but we really did believe that everything was going to be easy from then on out. We were aboard the most amazing ship ever built in the old world, hurtling through space at a speed that had never been achieved by any craft in the history of man. Sure, we were going to land on a planet and start civilization over, but how hard could that be? We were living through an experience that most would have deemed impossible. The thrill of it all was enough to blind us to the harsh fact that things would never be easy for us again. There on the ship that day, we could not bring ourselves to acknowledge the challenges that we knew would have to be faced, nor did we take the time to ponder the challenges we knew nothing of yet.
 There was no guarantee that we would survive the first year on Pangaea. I knew that those thoughts were the reality of the situation, and I believe that Alice, in her heart, knew that as well. We just couldn't face that fact then because we had been through hell over the previous days. We needed hope. We needed to believe that things were going to get better. It was foolish and irresponsible to allow such a drawn out vacation from the harsh reality. We needed to remain grounded in it, stuck hard to firm ground in order to deal with the consequences of our escape.
Alice and I looked at each other after several minutes, our smiles faded, and our laughter having abruptly died away. We knew then that our hope was premature and our view on the “paradise” we were sailing towards was unrealistic.
“I know that we can’t afford to let our guards down.” I told her quietly, “But we have to try to make the best of this, babe. We’re all we have now. We’re all that we’re ever going to have.”
She nodded as she reached up to wipe a stray tear from her eye.
“You sound like your dad.” She told me, “So reasonable and so… ‘This is how it is. This is how we make it work.’”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
After grasping my hands, she smiled slightly.
“He might not have liked me, but I liked him. I always saw a lot of him in you. I see it even more now. If he were here, he’d be proud of you.”
Why she said all of that just then, I didn’t know. I didn’t believe that it was true. The carefree joy we had felt just mere moments earlier was replaced by a sadness so strong, it rattled my nerves. The mention of my father made tears come into my eyes. Alice, crying with me, reached up and wiped them away. She kissed me again gently.
“I love you, and you’re right. We’re going to make the best of this, and we’re going to be alright. We survived the worst of it. We can survive what’s left. You’re right about that, Quinn. I love you.”
I looked up at her and put my hand on her face.
“I love you, too.”
***

The food was pretty decent. The cots were relatively comfortable. Even after a week and a half of watching the movies they had stored, we weren’t bored. We were able to talk to people from other countries and learn how they had discovered that the world was ending.
With everyone, it had all started with the dream.
One man from France told us about seeing a creature very similar to the one we had seen. When we asked if he had killed it, he shook his head.
“I should have.” He said through his heavy accent. “I know it was somebody.”
“Did anyone you love go missing?” Alice pressed him gently.
“Yes. My wife and my brother both went missing. I know that she was the one following me. I should have ended it for her, but I could not.”
To think of that man’s wife tossing and turning in some unknown purgatory we couldn’t begin to picture clearly disturbed Alice so much that she stopped sleeping through the night. I would wake up, hearing the people all around me snoring or breathing steadily, and Alice would be sitting up in her bed, squinting at her crocheting book and trying to follow the instructions, or doodling, or reading those books about the rich kids at a New York City private school that she had insisted on bringing, all by the very dim light of her dying flashlight. 
I didn’t want to ask people about the monsters anymore, but Alice insisted on getting all the information we could.
For some, it was the Watchers we had encountered. Other people described being stalked (and in some cases, attacked) by giants wearing fur and armor.
“Like a giant? Or a troll?” I pressed eagerly.
“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would choose one or the other.” The strange woman from Maine answered. “But since I don’t know…”
It didn’t matter, so I didn’t explain it. How she didn’t know what a giant or a troll was, though, I didn’t know.
“I just know that those things were huge, and they would have killed me if he hadn’t stopped them.” The woman beckoned to her husband.
“What did you do to stop them?” I asked, ready to file his answer away for future reference.
“I found my own beast, I guess. I beat the crap out of the thing. I’ve never done Karate or anything like that a day in my life. But I was like a cage-fighter, man. I’ll admit, it was kind of cool.”
I smiled slightly, remembering how it felt when I had ordered the cop to leave, only to see him turn and stride away as though I had simply bid him good evening.
Another person, who spoke a million miles a minute with words I had never heard used in conversation before, explained seeing some strange, child-like creature.
“It only had a circle with teeth in it. It wasn’t a mouth, per se.”
Weird…
All of that was fun for a week or so. Then, Alice and I began to grow restless as we awaited the day we could leave the ship. After exploring every part of it, we were ready for some open air. The walls were beginning to feel like they were closing in. Though the ship was large, we were beginning to feel like were closed inside of a shoebox.
One night, we all got a scare. Randomly, while everyone was in the cafeteria having dinner, the ship began to bob up and down only slightly. Nobody stopped talking; they were paying no attention to the vibrations that Alice and I felt beneath our feet. Then, there was a deafening bang, and everyone in the room was thrown up into the air several feet, only to come smacking back to the ground. For a minute, our stomachs dropped, and I knew in my heart that we were plummeting right out of the sky, falling into the infinite space below us. There was nothing that would catch us in the dark open space beneath us.
But then, just as the screams of terror and the shrill emergency sirens reached a deafening peak, it was over. I looked up to see a girl a little older than Alice and I clutching a sobbing little girl close to her. An older man, presumably her father, had his arm around her shoulder. She shook him off and stood back up with the child still attached to her chest. One of the other girls with her was being ushered to her feet by a pretty red-headed woman who I could only assume was her mother.
The first girl and the man were the ones we had seen in the hallway. I had only seen fractured groups thus far, and they were the first family where all of its members appeared to be intact. They appeared to be doing alright. That made them the luckiest group, in my opinion.
Alice and I were walking back to our room one night when the little girl I had seen came running around the corner, giggling as her older brother chased her. Behind them, the two girls were walking in silence, not looking at each other.
“I am sick of this ship.” The older of the two muttered as she stared straight ahead. The younger gave no response.
“Well, I guess we’re not the only ones who just want to freaking get to Pangaea already.” Alice muttered to me as the door to our housing compartment slid open to let us in.
“Are we going to live here on the ship, or are we going to rough it out in the wilderness?”
 I was trying to distract her from what I knew was a severe case of cabin fever. I was experiencing the very same thing.
“Definitely the wilderness.” She replied as we laid down on our beds that we had pushed together. “I’m sick of this ship, too. Once I’m off of it, I’ll probably never come back inside.”
“You’ll have to come inside to eat.”
“No, I won’t. We’ll learn to hunt and fish. We’ll live off the land. Isn’t that what you always said you wanted to do? Remember? Your parents were calling you like, every five minutes that day, and you got all frustrated and said you wanted to go live on an island where there was no service. You said we would learn to hunt our own food, and we’d live in a log cabin we built out of the trees there.”
“No.” I corrected her. “I changed my mind, remember? I said that I’d rather live in a house made out of palm leaves. It is way more authentic.”
“It might be more authentic, but I would definitely prefer the log cabin. I like having doors and windows. I like kitchens.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have a stove.”
“That’s okay. We would cook outside on a fire, and we’d bring the food in to eat in the kitchen. I can picture it; we’ll have oil lamps lit instead of having electricity.”
I realized then that we were no longer talking about the fantasy I had dreamed up while frustrated over always being wired in with everyone. We were talking about Pangaea. I laid back, picturing what she was saying.
“We’ll catch our own food.” She continued, “We’ll cook it ourselves. We’ll make plates out of rocks and silverware out of bamboo shoots.”
“I’ll build us furniture out of trees. Maybe we’ll find some way to make paint, and you can start painting again.”
“Yeah. We’ll find some way to make fabric, and I’ll sew us curtains and blankets and cushions for our couches.” She laughed and covered her face. “This is so ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not.” I told her after propping my head up on my hand and turning to face her. “It’s cool. I like talking about this, believe it or not.”
“I barely believe it, because I know how you are about feelings.”
“Hey, I am a sensitive guy.”
“Yeah, right. And Satan liked to snuggle.”
“Did you just compare me to Satan?” I asked, trying to feign offense. “That's low.”
“No!” She exclaimed, picking up her pillow and whacking me in the face with it. “I was just kidding. You can be very sensitive sometimes. Like when I force you to watch any movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book. You think I don’t see the man-tears, but I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen nothing!” I exclaimed in mock outrage before we both started laughing raucously again.
The people on the other side of Alice’s bed were scowling at us. They were a couple that had clearly been married for many years. Every time I looked over at them at night time, they were turned away from one another. I never saw them exchange a word of conversation, either. They spent a lot of time praying, speaking loudly enough to God for all of us to hear. One night, when I was feeling particularly grim, I wondered if one day, after spending every waking moment together for many years, Alice and I would become like them. My parents had been toying with the idea of getting divorced, and they had been high school sweethearts, if people still even use that expression. Was that just marriage? It begins and it ends before death parts the two involved?
Alice and I were, for all intents and purposes, married now. We were on our own, living without the constant supervision of our parents. We were traveling on that journey together. Once we got to Pangaea, because we were together and because we were all that either of us knew, we would be living together. We loved each other. Were we doomed to scowl at those in the midst of young love one day because they had exactly what we had lost?
Those were heavy thoughts for me at that age. But after everything, it was easy to travel down some deep cerebral path into the meaning of it all, into the past and the future. I believed that Alice and I would be together forever. She believed the same. As we talked about where we saw ourselves on Pangaea, we believed in our permanence as a couple even more resolutely.
We were going to build our log cabin, hunt our food, build our furniture, and make a life for ourselves. Some people would kill for that chance, but we hadn’t needed to. We were forced into that life by some cruel trick of fate where every other option was incinerated.
It was thrilling. It was terrifying. It was the best and the worst of scenarios.
I never would have survived those days of uncertainty without her there, helping me hatch those crazy schemes and believing in them with me. I never would have survived all that came to pass later without remembering all we had dreamt up. It had seemed so childish at the time; it was almost completely ridiculous. But it never left me. Those days with her have still never left me.

Violet

“Look, Maura! Look at it!” Penny exclaimed excitedly as she pushed her way through the large crowd of people gathered around the window at the far end of the Atrium.
“I see, darling. That is something, isn’t it?”
“Look at the stars! They’re still so far away!”
I looked over at Brynna to see her covering her mouth to hide a tiny smile that had emerged. Elijah nudged her with his elbow several times, practically bobbing up and down. He had always been the one obsessed with space and there he was, flying through it.
“Hold this.” He handed Brynna his water bottle, “I’m going to go stomp on children so I can get a better look.”
Brynna laughed now, and I couldn’t help but join in.
“We were the first to see it, you know.” James told me as he leaned against one of the pillars by the wall.
“You two were the first people awake?” I looked between the two of them in disbelief.
“I believe so.” James replied, “Well, there was another woman up, but that’s a grim story for another time.”
“What happened?” I asked, and my smile faded abruptly.
“It’s nothing.” James dispersed my need to know such a dark thing with an easygoing tone and a shrug of his shoulder. “You and your sister, you're two of a kind. You're fascinated with all things morbid.”
“Her husband had a heart attack in his sleep and died.” Brynna chimed in bluntly. 
When James and I looked over at her, me in shock and him in the beginning phase of anger, she exhaled the smoke from her cigarette, shrugged her shoulder, and raised one eyebrow.
 “You asked.”
Irritation welled inside of me. I hadn’t wanted to know that. The fascination with morbid things that James had commented on always resulted in me feeling an almost exaggerated, out of proportion level of sadness or disgust. Perhaps it was guilt at being so enthralled by the macabre. I hadn’t needed to know that and yet I had asked. She had told me. Neither of us acted in my best interest.
Brynna should have avoided the topic for my benefit the way James had. When I was young, she exhibited some sensitivity on emotionally heavy things. As I got older, she became more and more forceful with the truth. Once I had reached the age of seventeen, my feelings were not spared on anything. I sympathized for Penny; when I looked over at her, I saw that Elijah was holding her up so she could see out of the window better, and her eyes were lit up with such amazement at what she was seeing. I pitied her suddenly and painfully. On one particular day, with no precursor to the sudden change, she would find Brynna, who was warm to her now, suddenly cold and hardened. Her feelings would change from adoration and a perception of safety to what bordered on hatred for having to face the scary world without her older sister’s guidance.
“Really?” James snapped at Brynna in disbelief.
“Pardon me, but she is my sister. I will decide what she hears and what she does not, thank you so much.”
“And what was the purpose of telling her that? Oh, that's right. There isn't one.”
Brynna shrugged.
“It is the reality of the situation. We can’t afford any naivety here. Not anymore…”
“Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked her, just as Elijah returned from the group, beaming like a schoolboy who had just tripped and landed on top of a particularly good-looking and well-built woman. But upon hearing my question, his smile disappeared and he looked at Brynna quizzically.
“So, that is what I was saying earlier to you, James.” 
Brynna looked up from the pamphlet she had been reading. She was a pro at pretending she hadn’t been listening to what someone, especially I, had said.
“Don’t use me to avert the situation.” James replied snidely, “You’re so eager to answer questions, why don’t you answer hers?”
Her expression darkened suddenly when her eyes met his. I watched her hands start shaking and braced myself for an explosion of rage. She meandered through life, suppressing every tiny feeling that crossed her heart. Her insides inflated slowly until finally, like a balloon with too much air, they burst loudly. When that happened, we all knew to steer clear of her. The rages were unlike anything any doctor had ever seen.
But she took a slow, cleansing breath the way she had once read she was supposed to do when her anger reached that point. When she spoke, her voice was trembling and jumping an octave every couple of seconds as she forced the shout back down into her stomach.
“This is more important.” She took another breath. “You seem to know everything about our current predicament, so let me ask you this: Why is this ship so intricate? It was originally intended to be a means of escape. It was supposed to be our transportation. Why does it look like the interior of a vacation resort? I feel like I just won a radio contest.”
“Didn’t I explain this to you, dear?”
Oh boy…
“People like your parents, who were going to escape the earth, surely wouldn’t be transported on anything that wasn’t state of the art. God forbid they travel like the rest of us. Actually, when this ship was being built originally, it was because it was going to be used to transport anyone who could pay a large sum of money to Pangaea for an intergalactic vacation. Instead, people like your parents commandeered it to escape what was going to happen. Even though what just consumed the planet was completely, one hundred and fifty percent, the fault of your parents.”
My heart dropped with a resounding thud that echoed in my ears. I covered my mouth in horror, feeling my brain starting to twirl end over end inside my skull.
Brynna’s arms were around me, and I was being ushered to one of the many couches.
“You accuse me of insensitivity, and then you pull that?” She snapped, “What is wrong with you?”
“Don’t be a hypocrite. You did the same damn thing.” James hissed at her furiously, but when he spoke to me, his voice was gentle. “Violet, I’m sorry. Despite what she may believe, I wasn’t doing that to upset you or her. I was just frustrated. I should have edited myself. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head and looked from him to Brynna and back again.
“It happened?” I managed to murmur tremulously, “It happened while we were asleep?”
Brynna looked up at James.
“You were awake, dear, so why don’t you scar her further and tell her exactly what happened?”
For a moment, I really thought he was going to whack her in the face. Granted, if he had, Elijah would have killed him. But thankfully, he suppressed his outburst and looked back at me, his eyes warm.
“Whatever it was, it shook the entire ship. They made an announcement to those of us that were awake that ‘the event’ had happened. We’ll never know exactly what it was. But you had the dream, Violet, so you can surmise. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was quick, okay?”
“But Mom and Dad…” I was rambling now, barely able to process a word of what he had said. “Mom and Dad are here, aren’t they?”
“Where are they, Brynna?” Elijah asked in a voice devoid of all emotion. “What did you do?”
Maura and Penny were starting to make their way back to us. I saw them getting closer in my peripheral vision. Brynna would be attempting to put an abrupt end to the conversation any minute now.
She answered him so quietly I barely heard her. But when she spoke, her voice was firm, unapologetic.
“I had no choice.”
My body jerked upwards so that I was standing. My heart dropped even further and yet still managed to beat although it was no longer in my chest cavity where it belonged.
“You left them?!” I screamed at her, and everyone in the Atrium turned to stare at us for a second, their jabbering ending abruptly so they could listen.
“What did you do now?” Maura asked Brynna irritably.
Brynna normally would have given her an earful for insinuating that she must take responsibility for causing someone great emotional upset. But now, she had my arm firmly in her grasp and was pulling me towards a door at the end of the hall. Once we were outside, and the door had slid shut behind us, she pushed me up against a wall, her body trembling with rage.
“You listen to me,” Her voice was shaking along with her body, “I had very little time. I had a decision to make, and I made it. They screwed everyone, Violet. They were responsible for this. And guess what? Your Mommy and Daddy were going to take off and leave everyone they had screwed over behind! We just beat them to it.”
“You left them! And they’re dead now!” I screamed at her as tears ran from my eyes. “You killed them!”
“I did nothing. They killed themselves! Let me make this quite clear to you: You are here, you are alive. I had a choice between saving you and saving them. Observe your surroundings to determine what my exact choice was.”
“How could you do that?! They’re our parents!” 
I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t fathom such grief. My parents had always been distant, and sometimes, I truly believed that my love for them was waning. But now they were gone because of Brynna. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye.
“They were nothing to me, Violet.” She scowled at me for showing such an abundance of weakness. “If you were even half as intelligent as I am, if you had even an iota of observational and inferential abilities, you would say the same thing.”
“You’re evil!” I pushed her, but she barely stumbled. “You’re evil, and you’re a bad person and you’re a… a… bitch! You’re a …”
I meant every word that I shouted. I meant every awful thought that I couldn’t quite transform into words. I hoped that she would be left behind someday. I hoped that she would die. After she was dead, I hoped that she would burn in hell for being so heartless.
She crossed her arms over her chest and watched me, shaking her head slightly, waiting for me to be done. Behind her dark-rimmed glasses, her eyes flashed not with hurt at any of the terrible things I was saying, but with a mild irritation. I wanted to rip her apart. I couldn't believe how badly I wanted to kill my own sister.
“I hate you!” I shrieked, “I hate you, Brynna! I wish you were dead instead of them! It should have been you!”
Our mother and Maura had both screamed the same words at one point in her life. If Brynna were human, what I had just said would have reduced her to a sobbing, broken mess. But her eyes only burnt even more brightly as a smile formed on her lips.
“You know that, don’t you?” 
I laughed in bitter rage through my tears. I would keep screaming my insults, accusations, and cruel wishes for her demise until she broke. I would keep screaming until I lost my voice, if that was what it took to bring her down. 
“You know that you were the one that deserved to die!”
“Yes, sure,” She replied, in that maddeningly calm, arrogant way. “I knew I was the one who was supposed to die. You are right, Violet. You caught me.”
“You stupid bitch! You evil bitch! It should have been you! Do you hear me?! It should have been you! You should have stayed behind! You should have died in that pool!”
I was throwing the worst event that had ever happened to us at her mercilessly, and above all the other things I said, I would feel the most guilt for hurling that terrible accusation from our past at her. I would regret all of it later, but mostly that. I was saying all of those awful things to my sister, who had, in her later years, been the one who raised me. She had molded me into the person I was. My parents had never been there, and when Maura was gone for three years, the responsibility of Penny and I landed on Brynna’s small shoulders.
I knew that. But I also knew that despite all they had done, I loved my parents, and she had left them to die.
“Plus, you knew that they would have left you behind! You knew they didn’t want you! I couldn’t understand why before, but I do now! They would have left you because they didn’t love you! Because you’re evil!”
I collapsed on the ground in a fit of tears, wanting to kick my feet and scream until my face turned red and my lungs no longer drew in breath. I could feel her gaze resting heavily on me. I could feel every last bit of her contempt at seeing what she believed was a pathetic display of failed strength.
“Have your tantrum, little girl.” She said after a long moment of watching me, “My stars, this is disappointing… I raised you better than this drama, Violet Mae.”
With that, she turned and calmly walked away.
***

Maura was talking to me. I don’t know how long I sat on the floor in that hallway before she showed up. When Brynna returned to the group, I’m sure Maura immediately began searching for me. Knowing my sister’s cruel tendencies, she knew that I would be in need of comfort. But she never could have imagined what I had just learned.
“Darling, sit up. Come on. That’s it.” 
After I had crumpled to the ground, I had slid sideways so that I was lying on my side at the base of the wall. Anyone who walked by me would assume that we had broken open some celebratory bottles of champagne while they were all still sleeping, and I was just a sad, drunk girl who would pass out eventually and be out of everyone’s hair. But obviously, Maura knew better.
I’ll admit that I was giving her no help; her small hands were attempting to lift the full weight of my body. But she was strong when she needed to be and was eventually able to maneuver me into a sitting position. I felt her hands on my face and her thumbs wiping my tears away.
“What happened, darling? What did she say? Whatever it was, you know she didn’t mean it. She’s just…” Maura sighed and moved my hair away from my face with both of her hands. “That’s just who she is, right? You know that.”
“Mom and Dad aren’t here, Maura.” I told her.
Her expression fell; she was as stunned by the revelation as I had been.
“She left them behind.”
While she had been shocked before, now she was downright horrified. Who wouldn’t be? The child she had raised had finally snapped and committed a foul, sinful act. She had left two people she was supposed to love unconditionally behind to die on Earth because she felt they were unworthy of being saved. In short, she had played God. There was no way Maura couldn’t be horrified, as she was seeing for the first time, clear as day, that Brynna was evil through and through.
I thought Maura was going to leave me. I thought she was going to storm after Brynna and scream at her all the things that I had already screamed. But she didn’t. We sat on the floor in silence for several minutes.
“I knew she was hiding something. She’s worse when she’s hiding something. God, with that damn Rachel Lilien, she was unbearable. But maybe we’re not giving her enough credit. Maybe she tried to save them, and they didn’t believe her.”
I looked up at her, saying nothing. My expression forced her to rethink that hypothesis very quickly.
“But she doesn’t hate them, Violet. I know that she doesn’t. They have their issues, yes. But she could never do something like that. She could never have left without telling them what was going on. I know that she blames them for Rachel’s death. She thinks your father hatched some scheme to shut her and that man up before they could drop some terrible bombshell about your mother, but you and I both know that’s utterly ludicrous, and she does, too! She couldn’t leave them behind because of Rachel, because she knows that they weren’t involved. She has to know that.”
“She has always hated them, Maura. Long before Rachel dropped dead. I had my issues with them, too. But I never could have left them to die!”
“Of course not. Alright, listen to me,” She grasped my hands, and I looked up at her, “I know this is difficult, but we’re going to get through this. We’ll deal with this when we get there, okay? Right now, we just have to make it to Pangaea. Then, we’ll grieve, we’ll be angry. We’ll do whatever we need to do to heal from this. Whatever you do, do not tell Penny.”
“How are we going to explain why Mom and Dad aren’t here?”
“We’ll tell her that they’re meeting us on Pangaea. She’s only four, darling. She’ll believe it. Then, once we’re there, we’ll tell her everything. You have to think about it this way, Vi: We’re stuck on this ship for weeks. There is nowhere to get away from each other. If you spend this entire time hating Brynna, you are going to drive yourself mad. So, you just have to put it away for right now. I know that is so hard. It’s unfair to ask this of you. But even though this ship is large, and there are some places to get away, there aren’t enough. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“I’ll never forgive her for this, Maura.” I whispered as new tears fell. “You know that, don’t you?”
Maura nodded, and I saw tears glistening in her eyes, too.
“I wish that wasn’t the case.” She said as calmly as she could, but I could hear that her voice was about to break. “But I know that it is.”
“Does Elijah know?”
Maura wiped at her eyes and nodded.
“Don’t expect him to be angry. He’s shocked, and he will grieve for them, but he won’t be angry like you are.”
“Are you angry, Maura?” 
I looked at her now, thinking that she would lie in order to alleviate my own fury at Brynna. What we needed more than anything was unity. We were traveling through space to an alien planet where we would be forced to start our lives from scratch. In that time of uncertainty, we needed what we knew. We needed to keep the people we had always known close, as they were the only familiar things that we would ever have again. They were the only reminders of our first world.
But Maura nodded in response to my question, those tears I had seen in her eyes finally streaming down her face. A soft sob escaped her, and she covered her mouth to stifle the next that was sure to come. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around her, crying again. I needed her more than ever now that my parents were permanently gone from both worlds.
“If I would have known,” Maura sobbed, “I would have stayed.”
I nodded, surprised at my own agreement.
“I would have stayed, too.”
***

Brynna and Elijah were talking quietly. I watched him put his face in his hand, knowing that he was fighting the same assault of tears that Maura and I had succumbed to earlier. She and I stood side by side, hand in hand, watching Brynna speaking to him with her hand rested on his knee. That was how she was comforting him. There was not even a hint of softness in her eyes, and I knew that from her lips, she was spewing nothing but lies and excuses.
“They would have left us behind.” “They never cared about us.” “I did it to save our lives.”
It was all bullshit, in plain terms.
“I need you two to understand something.” James said suddenly. As though under mind control, Maura and I turned our heads simultaneously in his direction. “It won’t change a thing, I know. But I cannot, if I am remaining honest, let her take all of the responsibility for her decision.”
“There’s nothing you can say,” I felt tears, angry ones this time, welling in my eyes, “Even if you all said that they couldn’t come, she should have stayed with them. Either that, or she should have done everything in her power to convince you and your friends to let them come. She’s their daughter.”
“Look, I know that you love your parents, Violet. But they were responsible for this. Your mother, throughout her time in office, stepped on every toe she could. Your father covered up the things she did. They were responsible for what was coming if, in fact, it was nuclear.”
“But you don’t know for sure that it was!” I snapped at him, furious that he would insinuate, though he did so with a veil over it, that my parents were solely responsible for the destruction of the earth. 
“If it was a solar storm or something, then they weren’t responsible. That doesn’t mean that she had to abandon them! That doesn’t mean that she had to trick us into coming with her! We’re just as guilty now, don’t you understand?!” The tears began to fall again, “We’re just as guilty because we didn’t force the truth out of her!”
“We never would have gotten it out of her. You know that, Violet.” Maura told me quietly as she shook her head. “Our hands are clean in this.”
“They’re not!” My body was trembling now with a rage I knew was spiraling out of control. “We should have made her tell us the truth. Now, we left them behind, and they died alone. Mom was in the house by herself! Dad was in his office! They died alone when it hit!”
“How do you know that?” Maura asked as she grasped both of my hands tightly in her own. “Sweetheart, I’m sure they were together. Brynna said that they knew this would happen, so I’m sure that he was there with her. Don’t torture yourself, Violet. Don’t picture how it happened. Please, if not for your sake, then for mine.”
“But I know it! I know!”
Maura looked at James for help, but he was rendered silent by my determination to believe. But he also knew, from his own ability to just know, that I was probably right. When Maura continued to stare at him, begging for him to reassure me that my belief on the subject was just a grim fantasy, he shrugged slightly.
“I can’t say that she didn’t see it. When did you see that, Violet?”
“While I was asleep!” I cried before putting my face in my hands to hide from their concerned gazes for just a minute. “I woke up crying for them. But you wouldn’t know that, would you, James? You and Brynna were off exploring like this is some vacation! Like the world didn’t just blow apart! Like everyone you ever knew didn’t just burn away! What is wrong with you two?! How can you not care about this?!”
“Whoa, whoa…” James held up his hands in defense. “I know what just happened, Violet. I know better than anyone. I saw this long before anyone else knew a thing. What I’m trying to tell you is that Brynna’s decision was not completely hers. The original group of people who had that dream, people from all over the world, mind you, voted. We decided that your parents and all the people involved with them couldn’t come with us, because they were in the group that was going to leave us behind. Now, I will say that Brynna agreed. She wanted to leave them, too, but only for that reason. I can promise you, that it was only that.”
“You voted…” I repeated in a fierce, incredulous whisper. Before I could stop myself, I had lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face. Thank God there weren’t many people around to witness that embarrassingly overcharged outburst.
“Violet Mae!” Maura and Brynna exclaimed in shock and outrage, respectively.
“You voted on whether to let them live or die!” I screamed as I lunged forward to hit him again. “My parents!?”
Maura had pulled me away from him, but I was still charging forward, infuriated beyond any degree of anger I had ever felt. Who did he and his psychic friends think they were? How could they have determined the salvation or death of people they had never met? Who was he to decide whether my parents were worthy of being saved?
I must specify that I knew both of my parents were not good. I knew that they possessed some quiet evil in their hearts that they were scarcely aware of. But that didn’t mean that they deserved to die. In fact, on Pangaea, they might have been redeemed. Who was James Maxwell to decide that they didn’t even deserve that chance?
“That is enough!” Brynna was standing in front of me, shaking with a strong anger of her own. “We are not barbarians, at least not yet! I would appreciate it if you would refrain from acting like one!”
Though that was a typical Brynna line, the way her eyes flashed over from their usual icy blue to a fiery red was certainly not typical in any sense.
“Brynna…” Maura whispered, and her grip on me went lax. “What happened to you?”
After her arms released me, I fell onto my knees and stared up at Brynna in horror. Brynna looked at James for help in deciphering exactly what we were talking about, and he indicated his eyes. She nodded slightly and blinked to allow her own to dissolve back into their normal blue.
“Look in the mirror. And control yourself before you kill us all!” Brynna spat at me as she pulled a cigarette from the pack with a shaking hand.
I stood up and hurried to the mirror that was hanging over a desk in the corner of the room. I firmly believe that my heart stopped beating as I took in the sight of my own reddened eyes. How long had they been like that? What did it mean? I ran back to Maura and threw my arms around her neck, my whole body shaking with a new terror. It was the utter horror of finding myself unrecognizable. I was seeing clearly that something existed in me that was not entirely human.
“We don’t know why that’s happening to people.” James explained quietly. “Besides being able to see things and to just know things, people have been mutating.”
“Into what?” Maura asked as she ran her own trembling hand down the back of my hair and gripped me so tightly that I could barely breathe.
“We don’t know,” James continued calmly, “We have no idea.”
“I don’t want this. I never wanted any of this. Why didn’t you just leave me?” I cried before glaring at Brynna again. 
“It is too late now. So I suppose it is time you start making peace with the fact that you’re here. But for the record, I would have dragged you kicking and screaming.”
“Why?! You don’t care about me! You don’t care about Maura or Elijah or Penny! You only care about yourself!” I pointed my finger at her on the last part.
Behind her, a vase of flowers shattered, causing us all to jump and Maura to exclaim in horror. I looked at her, terrified, to see that she was grasping her heart, her eyes wide as she breathed heavily.
I looked at James and Brynna, my anger dissipating only to be replaced by that same fear I had felt a moment earlier. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but there was no way that those instances of anger causing some physical effect were meaningless. There was something happening. I felt it growing inside of me like a lethal cancer, eating through every part of me that I had possessed since birth. It was changing me over to some unfamiliar creature for reasons I couldn’t fathom. The same thing, as I understood from witnessing Brynna’s brief transformation, was happening to her and James.
“Don’t be afraid of it.” Brynna told me firmly. “It is happening for a reason. Isn’t that what faithful people like you are supposed to believe, Violet?”
 Her voice was dripping with condescension, and the rage welled inside of me again. At least that time, nothing broke.
“You can’t tell me that you two think this is good.” Maura snapped in a fierce whisper, “You can’t tell me that you think this is all just part of some plan! It’s wrong. It’s… unnatural!”
“How are we supposed to know what is natural?” Brynna asked after sitting down on the couch and lighting another cigarette. “Who are we to believe that what we knew was normal?”
“Because there was nothing else! Before this, there was nothing else but what we knew.” I told her. I sat down now, too, to keep from fainting. “What, do you have some theory on why all of this is happening?”
She exhaled smoke as she chuckled to herself softly.
 “You are asking me if I have a theory. Do you want to ask me next if Homer wrote The Odyssey? If humans are mammals? If my eyes are blue?”
“Please, darling, share it with us.” Maura snapped. 
I could see that her tolerance for the continued lunacy was wearing thin. It didn’t help that Brynna essentially gouged out our eyes and left us crawling around in the dark until she decided to heal our sight with her long withheld answers.
“It is adaptation. We are mutating in order to survive in a completely unfamiliar setting. We’re getting stronger, we’re getting smarter, and we’re getting a few extras thrown in. We are the last remnants of the human race. We are meant to start it over.”
“But,” I looked from her to James, “are we still human?”
“As far as we know. Our hearts are beating, we’re breathing. We must still be human. We believe that we’ll remain human. We’ll just have some other skills to help us out. You don’t have to be a believer in anything to believe that.” James told me, and I stared at him, watching my hand-print grow steadily clearer on his red cheek.
“I shouldn’t have hit you.” I muttered after diverting my gaze away from him.
“It’s understandable.” He brushed off my apology calmly. “I won’t say that I didn’t vote against allowing them to come, but I will say that your anger at it is understandable.”
“I need to ask, for my own peace of mind, why you left them, Brynna.” Maura blurted out suddenly. When we looked at her, we all saw a steely resolve in her eyes. She was going to get the truth immediately. There would be no more skipping around it with half-assed excuses or blatant lies.
Brynna was not weak when it came to Maura. She didn’t hold back or excuse her behavior. She never failed to be honest to the point of bluntness. The answer she gave Maura would be no exception.
“I knew they were not allowed to come. You all were. I made a choice.”
“Was it malicious? Did you leave them to die because of how much you hated them?” Maura pressed her.
Brynna stared at her for a long moment. Then, she shrugged but said nothing. Her response, or lack thereof, was psychological torture at its cruelest.
“Just tell me you didn’t! Just lie to me, if that’s what it takes!” Maura’s pleading shouts broke my heart. “I can’t afford to see you differently now! None of us can afford that. Just tell me it wasn’t out of hate, Brynna!”
I wanted to scream at Brynna to answer her as I watched Maura’s desperate need for that denial grow. But she just stared at her icily, raised one of her eyebrows, and pursed her lips in an expression of contempt and slight confusion.
“What makes you think I owe you anything at this point, Maura?” Brynna stubbed her cigarette out in the crystal ashtray on the table and walked away, leaving Maura to dissolve into tears that shook her entire body. I was responsible for comforting her now.
James hurried after Brynna, calling her name, sounding as though he was now at a level of fury on par with Maura’s level of grief. The intensity of both of their mental states mirrored my own rage, my own growing hatred. How could anyone be so heartless? I didn’t know what had made her that way, but I knew that while I loved her as my sister, I hated who she was at her core. Inside of her dwelt a spiteful, demonic creature that preyed on human weakness. It sniffed out every fear, every sadness, and every regret a person had ever suffered through and turned it against them. Through doing that, she controlled chaos because she created it.
I loved her because she was my sister. But after learning of what she had done to our parents, every last cruel act she had committed in our lives was amplified to a loud droning that would remain omnipresent in my ears, possibly forever.
I wish now that I had forced her to make me understand why she allowed such evil to exist in her. But I was so young and so incredibly blinded by my own pride and my own frustration at not being able to understand. I loved her because I had seen goodness in her as she raised Penny and me through the years.
That love, despite its purity, was weak in strength. It was eaten by the very same beast that lived inside of me, too.

Brynna

James had already been slapped once that day but he was clearly coming back for seconds. Though it had been Violet who had struck him, I was very close to doing the same despite my adversity to such dramatic consequences of feeling. There was never a need to physically harm someone when one could simply cut them down with words. But when he grabbed my wrist in a painful hold and spun me around to face him, I had to stop myself from striking the other side of his face with all of my newly discovered strength.
“What do you want?!”
“I want you to stop this.” He snapped at me, pointing one finger rather rudely close to my face. “You are driving them crazy. What did they do to you? What did they do that makes you think it’s okay to be so cruel to them?”
“Is this a lecture? Am I supposed to apologize? Are you living in that fantasy world where Brynna makes everything right by falling on her knees and begging for forgiveness?”
Believe it or not, that fantasy world’s population was booming.
“No, I live in the real world, where Brynna is going to go back and apologize. Then, Brynna is going to get her damn head on straight. Did you save them so that you would have punching bags? Is that what you need? Is that how you deal with your shit? By hurting other people?”
I giggled softly and pulled my arm from his grip.
“You are seriously attempting to lecture me on how to run my family. The last I checked, we had only just met. Therefore, you have no say in any of these things that you are protesting. It is none of your business. Consequently, you should stay out of it. Thank you so much.”
I went to keep walking (my course of action in every uncomfortable situation), but he grabbed both of my arms now, turned me around to face him, and pushed me up against the wall. Though he used very little force, I still viewed his abrupt manhandling of me as a violent assault and promptly kicked him hard in the shins.
“Thank your lucky stars I did not aim higher,” I breathed in his ear as he doubled over in pain, “Though honestly, if your conduct just now is compensation for an area of your physique that is physically lacking, which I suspect that it is, there is not much to aim for.”
I started to push my way out from in front of him, but he fought through the discomfort and held me against the wall even more firmly.
“What is it?” He asked me through clenched teeth, “What is wrong with you that you feel you need to act like this?”
“Let go of me!” I barked at him as I struggled to break out of his grasp.
“No. This is not going to keep happening. Up until this point, I have let you do what you want. But you are going to destroy them if you keep this up, and I know, in that disgusting, cold heart somewhere, you don’t want that. You wouldn’t have saved them just so you could destroy them.”
“This is none of your business, and if you don’t let go of me in ten seconds, I am going to start screaming that you are brutally attacking me. Do you really want people to think that this ship has its very own rapist?”
“God, you are infuriating!” 
After shouting that in my face, though, he did let go of me.
“What is it that you want, Brynna? Why do you insist on acting like this? What are you so damn afraid of that you need to treat them like this? Cuz that’s what it is, right? Elijah has said so. You’ve said so. You’re afraid of something, but what is it? Oh, and please, let me know what I did to you that made you hate me so much, too. Is it that I got close to you?” He asked tauntingly, with his face close to mine again. I shook my head slightly in disgust and avoided his eyes. “Is it that while you were dying, I saw your vulnerable side? Is it because while we were in the hallway, you told me you needed me?”
“You shouldn’t even care. Every other male in this population of survivors would not care why I act the way I act. They wouldn’t even care if I acted that way towards them. You are a man, aren’t you? Act like one.”
I spat that at him with as much venom in my voice as I could muster. But he had debilitated me, even if only somewhat, by bringing up what had occurred between us. The revulsion I felt at being so vulnerable with somebody, especially a man, was crippling.
“I do care. I care because even though you make me want to rip my hair out, I care about you. How could I not, after what we went through together? And you can say now that you don’t feel the same way. You can say that you never did. But I know that’s a lie. I know it.”
“You’re wrong.”
I forced myself to laugh. I wanted to run. I wanted to escape that moment of awkward sharing. I couldn’t imagine where it was going to lead. I would never admit a thing to him now that I had slept. Through rest, my disgusting, cold heart, as he had called it, had ricocheted me painfully back to my disgusting, cold senses.
“I warned you to stay away from me. I just do not know why you are pushing your luck. Why don’t you just run? Really, it’s better for you. I will pretend that I care about you for a moment when I tell you that you need to stay as far away from me as you can. In reality, though, I am telling you that because you have begun to truly aggravate me, and I can no longer stand your presence.”
“Well, you’re stuck with me!” He shouted furiously, “I don’t care whether you like it or not! I saved your life because I…”
“Why?” I demanded after pushing him away from me. “Why did you want to save my life? You had to, right? You knew that you had to. Isn’t that what you said?”
“No. Do you really want to know? I was just going to go see you in that bar so I could make my peace with leaving you behind. I had settled on it. I had let them convince me that you didn’t deserve to be saved, and the guilt I had over letting you die was killing me, Brynna. So, I forced myself to go see you in person. I was ready to leave, ready to forget you ever existed but…”
“But what?!” I screamed, needing an answer so desperately for reasons I did not fully understand.  How dare he make me question his intentions? How dare he tell me that I, too, was going to be left behind? What had changed his mind? I needed to know.
“I saw you across that room, and I couldn’t imagine never seeing you again. You…”
He stopped, not wanting to say it, because I had already insulted his masculinity several times, and because he thought it was so “cheesy” and dramatic, but it was the truth; it was truly how he felt, and he had to tell me now, because he had started to say it…
“It had never happened to me ever in my life,” He said quietly, with his eyes fixed on mine. “But I saw you across that room, and you took my breath away. And I couldn’t stand to leave you.”
I looked at him now as my heart dropped from my chest into open space and my defenses crumbled away as though succumbing to a witch’s spell. We stared at each other, both silent.
In a blur of movement that sent my heart leaping back up and forward to bang hard against the wall of my chest, we were flying together and wrapping our arms around one another. Then, we were kissing with the same passion and intensity of actors in an old romantic film. I could almost hear the outburst of old-time music, and I could almost see us in black and white. It is so very sentimental and childish to say those things, but that first kiss truly was magical, I am not sorry to say.
His strong hands moved up my back and came to rest on my face. My hands came to grip the front of his jacket, both of them clutching tightly the hard, rough leather. He smelled of Earth, of days in summer before the rain comes, or days in winter just before the snow. He smelled of moments so far back in time, but close enough to touch it seemed, in memory. 
He smelled of home.
I was not the most experienced kisser in the world, having never allowed any member of the opposite sex close enough to practice. There had been many who had attempted to get that close, only to be shut out immediately by my strong opposition to ever engaging in a romantic relationship. But with James, I found kissing him to be easy, almost effortless, like dancing in mid-air after gravity had been effectively erased. More than that, it was non-threatening. In fact, I knew in that moment that I was safe, knowing it more resolutely than I had ever known anything before. While I was there with him, with his firm body pressing me to the wall, no one and nothing could hurt me, I knew, not even the ever-present, unstoppable forces of the universe.
When he pulled away from me, I was besieged immediately by an almost unbearably harsh return of my senses. Our burdens, of knowing we were alive while most others had died so senselessly, so mercilessly, enshrouded us in a smothering, almost tangible fog. The full weight of our indiscretion, too, came to rest heavily on him, mostly, but on me, as well.
“Shit…” He whispered, running a hand over his head. 
Now, he was no longer looking at me. His shame was obvious, and I was stunned by how quickly it had overtaken him. How his senses had immediately told him that his quick dalliance with me was wrong, unnatural… He was twice my age. He should have known better. He was a predator, preying on a young, damaged girl, whom he knew had severe trust issues with her father. Wasn’t that what had made me receptive to his sudden advance? “Daddy issues.” They were always blamed when a younger woman was romantically linked with an older man.
“Brynna, I’m so sorry…”
He cleared his throat nervously, panicking, it seemed, as he tried to decide whether to just apologize profusely or try to reason away why it had happened. 
“I shouldn’t have let that happen. I…”
Before he could get out another word, his back was against the opposite wall, and my hands were on his face, and my lips were kissing his. For a moment, he was clearly stunned, and then his hands ran down to the small of my back and pushed gently so that I was pressed even more tightly against him, and his lips were moving against mine in that frenetic and passionate yet almost synchronized way. My heart was thumping wildly, and I feared only briefly that such erratic beats were dangerous; his protective embrace allowed for no fear. 
The sound of some small device, more than likely made of plastic or metal, clanging on the floor, made both of us start. Our heads snapped simultaneously in the direction from which the noise had come, and simultaneously, I’m sure, our hearts plunged downwards in dread. 
In the heat of the moment (and believe me, it was a firestorm), we had not notice Violet walking down the hallway with her headphones plugged into her ears. We only took notice of her presence when the sight of us shocked her so substantially that she dropped her iPod onto the floor.
We pulled ourselves apart, our bodies begging to continue, but our minds knowing that we had some new, very uncomfortable explaining to do. For the sake of appearances, I did not even let him grasp my hand. I could not afford for Violet to see me in such a vulnerable state after years of teaching her that the exact behavior I was exhibiting with James was unacceptable. I had encouraged her to one day find love, of course. All little girls needed to believe in the existence of true love. But I had warned her to be cautious. Always remain one step ahead. Never allow complete weakness to overtake you whilst you are with them. They would use every weakness you deigned to show them against you.
Maura had taught me the very same.
Violet’s eyes and mouth were widened to their farthest reaches. It would have been a hilarious sight if James and I had not just been caught doing exactly what we had sworn we were not. We had promised Maura and Elijah both that there was nothing between us, and yet there we were, kissing in the hallway, knowing that there was only one place that such affection was going to lead.
“I’m telling Maura. And Elijah!” Violet spat at us after rising from her stunned stupor. She turned to walk away, but I hurried after her and grabbed her arm.
“We are not afraid of either of them.” I informed her curtly. “But what good will that do? What will telling them about him and I accomplish?”
“What good did telling me about that woman’s husband dying do? What good did telling me about Mom and Dad do? Oh, right... Nothing!”
“So, this is an act of revenge...” I laughed half-hysterically, “Alright. If you feel the need for it, who am I to stop you? Despite what some would have us believe, vengeance is a very honorable and exciting path. Please, tell Maura and Elijah, especially if it will make you feel like you have won something over me. But know this: There is nothing they can do to stop me.”
“Why are you even doing this?” Violet screamed at me in loud, unabashed fury. Her temper had really gotten worse since boarding the ship. Perhaps it was a side effect of intergalactic travel. I would have to ask around for more information, to see if there were any other cases of ridiculously out-of-proportion outbursts since the take-off.
“Doing what, might I ask?” I replied.
“Are you with him?”
“Ask yourself if that is truly any of your business.”
“It is my business! You’re my sister! I don’t think you should be in a relationship with a fifty year old guy! It’s just…” She threw her hands up in a gesture that brought images of Maura to my mind. How very similar they were...
“Stop stammering and gesticulating in frustration. Say what you need to say.”
“It’s wrong, Brynna! Why would you want to be with a fifty-year-old guy?! I mean, come on! You're not ugly! And God freaking knows you’re not stupid! You don’t need money! You can get a guy your own age!”
“I’m not fifty.” James called to her over his shoulder from across the room.
“First of all, there is no relationship to speak of, so calm yourself. Secondly, I am well aware that my physical attractiveness is on par with most other women.”
“Way above par.” James called to us nonchalantly.
I had to suppress a chuckle and a gleam of pride.
“Third, I have no interest in boys who are of my physical age. I do not find them attractive externally or internally. In regards to all of the aforementioned points, you will be pleased to learn, also, that for once, I do not know something in certainty. I do not know what he and I are.”
I could sense that my gentleness, though it was minute, was surprising her. I was far more civil than I had been in days.
“But he has been good to us. He saved my life. As a result, I was able to save yours. You know that I do not trust many people, but I trust him.”
“Do you love him?” She asked in a voice saturated with condescending sarcasm. “Never mind! You don’t love anybody!”
“Don’t be silly. I feel strong affection for people. But with him, it is too early to tell. I must stress again that I do not know what we are. Tomorrow, I will probably be shunning him again. For right now, though, I need you to keep quiet about this.”
“Why should I? What have you done for me?”
I stared at her, crossed my arms, raised my eyebrow, and pursed my lips. I watched her expression dissolve, and she nodded, realizing that a better question to ask was what hadn’t I done for her?
“I don’t approve of it, and neither will they.” Violet informed me, and I heard a resolution in her voice that gave me little room to doubt that she was serious.
“Luckily for us, we do not care what you think.” I smiled at her and walked back to James.
“Well, is it over again?” He asked me. I shook my head and grasped his arm. “Not until tomorrow, right?”
I looked up at him and rested my chin on his shoulder now.
“Do not start being callous.” I stood on my tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “You have to be patient with me. Okay?”
He sighed heavily and raised his eyes to meet mine. Then he leaned forward to kiss me again quickly.
“I know. And I will be.”
***

Elijah was not keen to suspicion, but Maura realized immediately that things had changed between James and me. She had always told me that I would never find love with a boy my own age, and yet her disapproval of James was resounding. Sure, she liked him as a person. He made her laugh when the rest of us could not even get her to smile. But the idea of him and me was not one she could tolerate.
“It is like it's always nighttime. Do you think it will be that way on Pangaea?” I asked her randomly as we sat in front of the large window in the Atrium. It was particularly quiet in there that day, as many people were crowded around the televisions in the recreation room. Some were betting on a football game that had long since passed in real time. Others were engaged in a “chick-flick marathon.” I was not quite sure what that meant, but Violet insisted on going, saying she needed her spirits to be boosted by the idealism present in all of the films. Though it was a line that I would have used to explain my presence at that estrogen-charged soiree, I couldn’t help but shake my head slightly at how young she still was. If she had matured, she would not need that assurance from films that led girls to believe in princes and happy endings.
The cuteness was too exhausting to think about for long periods of time.
“I don’t know,” Maura replied, “Maybe you should have gone with Violet.”
“Why? Am I bothering you by sitting here quietly reading?”
“No. I just think that maybe you’d see in those movies how it is supposed to be.”
For the first time since I had sat on the couch across from her, I noticed a glass of some copper-colored liquid that I knew to be liquor. Fantastic…
“Do you think I’m blind, Brynna?” She narrowed her eyes at me, “Do you think I’m stupid? I realize that you believe yourself to be one of the smartest people still alive, and maybe you are. But that does not mean that the rest of us are so thick that we don’t see what is going on.”
“And what, dare I ask, is going on?” I asked after getting up to pour a drink of my own. Sometimes, I suffered through bouts of very slight sensitivity, and alcohol, I am sad to say, was the only tonic that could re-weld the steel in my spine.
 “What exactly are you hinting at right now, Maura?”
“I know about you and James.”
“Oh?” I asked icily. After taking a gulp from my glass, I felt the liquid burning my throat all the way down before detonating inside of my stomach. Just like that, I felt stronger, ready for the barbs, for the very slight pain they inflicted.
“Yes.” Maura replied defiantly.
“Is this the part where I am supposed to confess all? You are expecting some small revelation, but I will end up supplying several gory details, as they say, that you never expected. Is that what is supposed to happen now, Maura?”
“I want you to be honest right now. I want you to tell me everything.”
“You never answered my question.”
“You asked several. I would ask you which one you would like me to answer first, but I was the first one to ask a question, so you’ll answer mine.”
“You never asked a question. You suggested something that is untrue in every sense.”
“Are you really going to lie to me? Isn’t that below you? You have always been overly blunt about everything, almost to a point of mercilessness. Now you’re going to start lying? Is that to protect me or to protect yourself?”
“I have not given you any reason to believe that I am lying. But if I were, I can assure you that it would not be for your benefit. Nor would it be for my own. As I have not lied thus far in this conversation, I should not even be saying that. But if I were beating around the bush, as they say, it would be because what you are asking is none of your damn business. So why don’t you finish your drink and pass out before you say something now that you will regret as you nurse your hangover tomorrow morning? I do not want to have to deal with your pathetic apologies. They always involve tears, and you know how that upsets my stomach and rattles my cool disposition.”
I will admit that calling her out on her drinking was cruel. But for her to assume that my business was her business was ridiculous, in plain words. The woman had raised me to the best of her ability and then spurned me without warning as though I had never existed. Plus, in our joint past, there was one huge issue that was irreversible and irreparable. That is not exaggeration.
She slammed her glass down on the table, and I stared at her, unfazed by her anger’s sudden rise. She was giving me exactly what I wanted. She was giving me weakness on which I could prey.
“I show the slightest bit of concern for you, and you insult me.”
“I didn’t insult you. I spoke truthfully. I suppose that the truth does hurt. Let me make it a little bit more uncomfortable.” I leaned forward and exhaled smoke from my newly lighted cigarette in her direction. “You are a drunk. When you are intoxicated, you say unkind things. They do not hurt me, because nothing hurts me. But they do irritate me. That I cannot deny.”
Silence fell between us, but our gazes held fast. It was a battle of wills, a power play. Stare into the eyes of an animal and assert your power. Do not back down, or you lose. I would not lose to Maura.
“What?” She whispered, drawing out the word in a perfectly sadistic mimic of a mother’s cooing tone. In a sudden polar switch, her voice iced over. “Are you waiting for me to say that you’re a heartless bitch who left her parents to die?’
“Do you see what I mean?” I asked with a slight smile. “I simply cannot wait to hear ‘I was just so angry, darling. But I could never mean that. I could never call you that and mean it. I love you. Despite everything that you’ve done, I love you.’” 
Though it was almost unforgivably immature, I spoke in her northern English accent when I imitated her.
“Despite everything that I have done…” I repeated again, speaking normally. “Like you are some all-forgiving saint who sees past all those sins and transgressions I have committed in my twenty-two years…”
“Like you don’t know why I say that! Like you don’t know why I would call you a heartless bitch!” She spat, livid now. “Now you pretend that he never existed! All to avoid personal responsibility. I have been thinking that you are a heartless bitch, but I haven’t said it! And you need to hear it! And now you’re just going to go start screwing James? Why do you insist on self-destructing, Brynna Claire? He will destroy you! Have I taught you nothing?”
“You have taught me next to nothing. I possess the worst of you, Maura. All of your goodness was given to the other three. You and I both know that. Isn’t that why we don’t see eye to eye?”
 I blew smoke towards the ceiling. I watched it billow upwards, almost glimmering against the black backdrop whisking by outside of the ceiling window. 
“Whatever James and I choose to do is our decision. I am twenty-two years old and fully capable…”
“And he is, what? Forty? Forty-two? Forty-five? You might think you are mature. I do not believe that you are as mature as you think you are. In your heart, I don't think you believe it, either.”
“That statement was completely redundant...” I interrupted her with an amused grin on my face.
“He will be the end of you, Brynna.”
“I would give you the benefit of the doubt by saying that I believe all of this is coming from a good place. It is coming from concern. But then, every last instinct I possess is telling me that this entire conversation is malicious.”
“It is not malicious!” She exclaimed in a rage that the situation did not warrant. “I care for you! I force myself to care for you even though you are so cruel! You are so heartless! I do not understand you at all, but I force myself to care because I’ve had you since you were a child! But please, do not think that I am so blind that I don’t see what you are! How you could do that to your father, I will never know!”
Checkmate. My grin only grew in width, and my eyes gleamed with vicious triumph.
“Oh, so this is about him?” I asked with a derisive chuckle. “Everything is about him, isn’t it? Honestly, Maura… Are you really so pathetic that you still love him after what he did to you? Aren’t you the one who told me to show them no weakness? No mercy? And yet here you are, some twenty years later, still wailing about the one that got away.”
“Do you see what I mean? You have no heart. If you can say something like that, then you have no heart.” Her voice was on the verge of breaking now, but I saw a deep anger in her eyes that was stronger than her need to cry.
“Maybe I don’t.” I shrugged, still smiling slightly, “You want to know about James and me? We are taking it a day at a time but yes, there is something there. Is that what you are upset about? I was supposed to be a failure like you. But now, I am more intelligent, I am more physically attractive, and the man I want also wants me. That’s the trifecta of one-up-manship in this particular case, is it not?”
In a blur, she leaned forward, brought her hand back, and went to slap me across the face. I was used to those furious, drunken spasms. I had even grown used to the cutting remarks she made while intoxicated. The things she said to me over the years were some of the cruelest I had ever heard. In those words, I found my own malice, my own dark inclination and ability to hurt people.
I grabbed her wrist without even looking in the direction from which her hand was coming. I held it hard in my hand, feeling my eyes flash over to that blood red color of inescapable wrath. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to choke her. I wanted to cause her as much pain as I could. But there was affection for her, even if it was so complicated that contemplating its strength was like attempting to complete a math problem without actually seeing the numbers. So when she cried out in pain, I released my grip.
“And now… Now I don’t even know what you are.” I grimaced when tears began to run down her face.  “I think you’re possessed, Brynna. I think you always have been.”
Her tantrum had drained whatever energy was left. The alcohol had numbed her enough that she could sleep. I knew that she was ready to lose consciousness, having ushered her to her room and gotten her safely tucked away in bed so many times before.
“You have always been evil.”
“Yes, I know.”
I put her arm around my neck and walked her slowly out of the room. While we were on the stairs, she stumbled over her feet several times, forcing me to practically carry her. When her legs finally gave out, I lifted her with one arm and walked the rest of the way as she muttered over and over again how sadistically twisted I was.
“It is the devil. If I believed…”
“Just shut up and go to sleep.” I snapped as I laid her down in bed.
I covered her up with the thin blanket and sat down across from her on Violet's bed. I knew that she and Violet fell asleep every night clasping hands across the space between them. Perhaps in her inebriated state, she believed that I was my sister, though we looked nothing alike. Maura's eyes were fixed on mine when she reached out for my hand. I stared at her before scoffing in condescending disbelief. How she could expect my comfort after all she had said, I did not know.
“Brynna...”
In her voice, I heard a soft, tremulous plea. She needed my support, for whatever reason. She needed a moment of compassion from me. At first, I refused her request. Then, with a roll of my eyes and a muttered expletive, I reached out to link her fingers with mine.
“You do know… he’d still be alive… if you had never been born…”
I had lit another cigarette and took a long time exhaling the smoke. I wanted to close my eyes, thinking that doing so would help me block out his face. I was masked in the smoke, and she could not see me. I tried to shut my eyes for just one second, but his young, smiling face just snapped into jarring clarity against the darkness, and my eyes shot open as a jolt of panic went through me; if his smiling face was there, a second or so later, his closed eyes, his pale skin, and his blue lips would begin to seep through the image until there were no other memories of him.
“You do know… that if we had to lose one… it should have been you?”
“I have never been able to doubt that, Maura.” 
Just before she passed out, she looked up at me and whispered:
“I should have smothered you in your crib.”
I watched her eyes close as her body dropped into a heavy, unshakable sleep. I nodded slightly to myself, bemused by the fact that I had nothing to say. Even if I did, she was away in some dreamless world where I, mercifully, did not exist. After some time draped in a thoughtful silence, I found a suitable response.
“Yes.” I shrugged, “Perhaps you should have.”
I felt arms wrapping around me, and I jumped, whipped around, and threw myself on top of the person I believed was attacking me. I looked down to find that it was James, looking more brilliant than ever in my eyes that had flashed white.
“Should I have said something?” He asked quickly as he held his hands up in surrender. “I should have said something.”
I let out the breath I was holding and laid my head down on his chest. A peculiar but dreamily comforting wave of warmth passed all throughout my body when his arms came up to hold me. After his lips pressed to the top of my head, I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply the scent of his cologne, and become steadily more hypnotized by the sound of his beating heart.
“So, Maura is cut off from here on out.”
“Good luck.” I propped my head up to look at him and rolled my eyes. “Elijah and Violet have been requesting that she stop her frequent binge-drinking for many years now. They even offered to accompany her to Alcoholic's Anonymous.”
“You could have just called it 'AA.' I wouldn't have thought you less intelligent, just so we're clear...”
I frowned at him and slapped my knee in a sarcastic show of enthusiastic amusement.
“I knew you'd appreciate that one. On a much less lighthearted note, does Maura say that she wished she had committed infanticide with Violet and Elijah, too?”
“Of course not. That would be terrible.” My gaze diverted from his. “I was not aware you were listening to mine and Maura's slight disagreement.”
“I was. Well, I overheard the tail-end of it. I doubt she meant the things she said. But even if she was just pissed off, she was wrong to say all of that.”
“Wrong in the content of what she said, or wrong in saying such a potentially hurtful thing at all?”
“Both.”
“Not many people would agree with you on the former though surely, many would agree with you on the latter.” I paused and mauled over my statement. “Actually, both the former and the latter would be agreed upon by most people. I was wrong in suggesting that they would not be.”
“Who cares what they think?” He reached out and gently moved my hair away from her face.
“You felt that way a few times.” I laid my hands on his firm chest and rested my chin on them so I could look at him still. “When I was aggravating you, I am sure you thought the same, even if it was not clear to you.”
He turned so that I was now lying on the cot, and he was above me. He came down and kissed my lips gently; that scintillating wave of warmth streamed through my body once again.
“I could never think that about you.” He said before grinning wryly. “Even when you're abusing me for not paying attention to my faulty tires, I don’t think that.”
I reached up to put both of my hands on his face. I found myself smiling, as well.
“If I didn't abuse you for those things, you would scarcely know what to do with yourself. Besides, I hardly abused you. I merely assailed you with a stick of mozzarella cheese. I knew that any injuries you could sustain would be minor.”
“Yeah, it didn't hurt, per se, but it startled me. That was the worst part, I think.”
As usual, I was laughing at a loud volume and with an intensity that seemed to shake my bones. He always seemed to entertain me even when he tried just barely.
I pulled his face closer to mine and planted a soft kiss on his lips.
“You need to shave.” I rubbed the stubble on his face that was getting longer every day he chose to ignore it.
“I know.”
“Did you win the bet?”
“I remember that game. All of us old guys did, so we all won.”
“What was the prize?”
“Bragging rights.”
“Well, that should be enough, I suppose.” I grasped his upper-arms and furrowed my brows slightly in surprise; his biceps seemed to have grown. I remembered him as being slightly thinner than most men when we had met. Now, as I observed his body shrouded only in a tight black T-shirt and jeans, I found that his muscles had hardened slightly and toned themselves.
“Have you been working out?” I asked him suddenly.
“No. Well, some of the other guys and I lifted some weights the other day. Then, we realized quite suddenly that we're not twenty anymore, so we went to the Rec Room and watched Rocky.”
“That did not inspire all of you to work out some more?”
“It did, but we would have looked ridiculous running up both sides of the steps in the Atrium.”
“Yes.” I replied, laughing at the mental picture. “I would have found that most entertaining. It would have opened you up to much public ridicule.”
“Well, no one could ridicule me better than you, my dear.”
“That is very true.” We both laughed and kissed again, this time for even longer and with even more passion erupting between us. After we pulled away, I rubbed his arms to feel his tight muscles again. I had to admit, his newly enhanced physique was rather erotically stimulating.
To distract myself from those thoughts, I changed the subject.
“Did you talk to the pilot today?”
“I did. Two more days, and we’re there.”
“Can I ask you something serious?”
“Please do.”
“What are we going to do once we’re there?” I looked at him, having put off this question for the three days that had passed since we had kissed in the hallway. “Am I jumping the gun, as they say, asking you that? Am I getting ahead of myself? Not that I care, but you’re disturbed, aren’t you? You think that I am taking this too seriously?”
“No. I don’t.” He replied as he grasped my hand, “We’ve come this far. Of course you’d ask that question. But I think I should be asking you that, Brynna. If we’re being honest, you and I both know that you’re the one that’s going to pull away.”
“Have I pulled away thus far?”
“Several times.”
“I mean since the other night.”
“No. You’ve gotten close, but you’ve stuck it out. Obviously, I'm happy about that. What do you want to do once we’re there?”
I sat up and looked at him, studying his handsome features as I contemplated how to phrase what I needed to say. The topic was on a high emotional level with which I was not comfortable but for his sake, I would tread the dangerous waters of a discussion on feelings.
“It is going to take a long time for me to reach the point that you need me to reach.”
“Which point is that?” He prodded me gently.
“In relationships, one is supposed to let his or her guard down. They are supposed to give themselves over to the other person completely. That is what occurs in those ridiculous movies Violet is watching. Isn’t that how it works?”
“In best case scenarios, yes.”
“I do not know if I will ever be at that point. You are going to get frustrated. You are going to want to run for the hills eventually, James. I know you will. I will not change, even if you do leave. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Of course I do.”
“We just have to see how it goes in that regard.” I linked my fingers with his as I spoke. “But when we get to Pangaea, I do want you to stay with me.”
“And I want to stay with you. That’s all we need right now. That’s all either of us has to hear at this point. Everything else we’re going to play by ear, okay?”
I nodded, assured by that and comforted by what I sensed to be absolute certainty in him that one day, I would come around. His faith in me was, in my opinion, unwarranted and sure to lead directly to a disappointment and a resentment so venomous that it would wreck him after it destroyed whatever semblance of love we had built.
Plus, we weren’t engaging in less-than-moral behaviors, if one catches my drift. I had always been told by Maura that all men wanted was a physical relationship and nothing else. I knew from personal experience that they would take what they wanted without warning, not caring to look back and view the damage. I was horrified, if I am being entirely frank, at the idea of participating in such activities, even with James. Though I found myself smiling at the thought of him (quite ridiculously) and feeling a vivid joy in every minute spent in his company (quite immaturely), I couldn’t bring myself to do that.
It was only a matter of time until that reluctance drove him away.
“I’m in no rush.” He told me, as though he had read my mind. I had looked away from him, falling into a reverie on the very subject he was discreetly commenting on.
“That is strange.” I looked up at him in genuine confusion.
“No. Don’t believe the stereotype. We’re not all like that, believe it or not. Once you get to be my age, you realize that there are more important things.”
“But you’re a man…”
“Gender profiling.” He shook his head at me. “That’s blatant discrimination, and I don't appreciate it in the slightest.”
“Oh, I do apologize.” I told him with another grin after leaning forward to wrap my arms around his middle.
“I have been calmer since you and I began this tryst that defies all definition. I have been in an uncharacteristically nice mood. Perhaps you make me happy.” I informed him softly. 
“You definitely make me happy.”
“Do I? That is nice to hear. Things do not seem as dire now. Up until my conversation with Maura, I did not feel the need to be overly nasty to anyone.”
“Well, Maura deserved it.”
“Maura does not approve of us. She suspects something. Once she suspects something, she thinks she can force a confession out of anyone.”
“But she just doesn’t know who she’s dealing with, right?”
“After all of these years, one would think she would realize that if I do not want to share something, it will not be shared.” I sighed slightly and shook my head to clear my mind of those irritating thoughts. “If things are still going well, we’ll tell them when we get there.”
James nodded, and we laid down, both exhausted from the long day of doing absolutely nothing. Boredom was quite taxing on one’s level of energy, if that can be believed.
“Just stay here with me for a few more minutes.” I rested my head on his chest and held his arm over me. “They shouldn’t be back for a little while longer.”
He kissed my head and held me tighter, his eyes closed.
“I will kick you off the bed if I see them coming.” I warned him after closing my own eyes. “Seriously. Right onto the floor, James.”
He laughed softly, and I smiled, too.
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
“Goodnight, James.”
***

Maura and I didn’t speak a word to one another for the remaining days on the ship. One morning, as we all lounged around on the couches in the Atrium, others began to run to the window, exclaiming about being able to see “it.”
Just as we all stood to see the spectacularly colored orb that was Pangaea outside of the window, the intercom beeped twice, signifying an announcement from the pilot.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your housing compartments. We will be arriving on Pangaea in fifteen minutes.”
There was a mad rush for the door. Maura went to grab Penny, but I lifted her myself.
“Do you think there are horses on Pangaea? And dogs?” Penny asked me excitedly. “Maybe Kingsley and Sheba and Jack and Lucy will have other dogs to play with now besides each other!” Penny gasped as another thought took hold of her. “Do you think there are turtles and dolphins?! Those turtles at the aquarium were so old, and do you remember how the bottle-nose dolphins? Do you think on Pangaea we can have them as pets?”
“I’ll bet they are here, but I don’t know if we can have them as pets.” I replied cheerfully, though I sincerely doubted that we would ever be seeing an animal we were used to. We would be the only living creatures on Pangaea, I was sure.
“Can you believe it? We’re seriously going to be on another planet!” Violet exclaimed behind me as she clapped her hands like an obnoxiously overexcited tween viewing her high-pitched singing, hair-flipping, sexuality-questioning idol for the first and last time ever.
“Really? I thought we were jokingly going to be on another planet.” Elijah grinned in satisfaction at his horrible joke.
I looked back at him, rolled my eyes and drawled, “Lame…”
“Come on, I can’t be expected to make good jokes right now!”
“Just because you are excited, little boy, does not mean that your standards of humor can fall. I will not allow such nonsense.”
I had to admit, I was excited, as well. My heart was fluttering madly in my chest, and I found myself biting my lip to suppress the smile that was trying to emerge. Because Elijah and Violet had moved in front of us, James knew it was temporarily safe to put his arm around my waist as we walked. When I looked at him, I could not fight the smile anymore. When I looked at Penny’s face to find such childlike wonder and anticipation there, my smile grew even bigger and a chuckle of pure merriment escaped me.
Once we were back down in our housing compartment and the ship workers were strapping people in, I felt a dismal drop in my mood.
“It’s alright.” James told me softly in my ear, “I'm going to be right next to you, baby.”
“James, I can't do this.” I muttered to him as I turned away from Maura's ever-watchful eyes. “You know that I can't stand it. Especially now, after what happened last time.”
“Hey…” James said, and the worker closest to us looked up. “Can you strap us both in on her bed?”
The man nodded and adjusted the straps so that they were longer. James, with his arms around me, laid us both down. At that point, I did not care which members of my family saw or what they thought of it. I would explain it away later, saying that James was able to calm my anxieties better than anyone else, therefore I allowed his closeness to keep from succumbing to a panic attack. They would surely believe that.
I kept my face buried in James’s neck as we were strapped down to the cot.
“This isn't so bad, is it? Besides the fact that you haven't broken this cot in at all, this is alright.”
“Pardon me for being light.” I muttered with only half the amount of sass I normally would have used. “James, I don't want to do this...”
“The pilot has done this before, ma’am,” The worker assured me gently, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“I don’t like this.” I whispered to James again, “I think I would probably take that pill again to avoid experiencing this.”
“There’s no way in hell I’d let you take that pill again. We’re going to get through this, baby. I promise. Fifteen more minutes, and we’re there.”
I nodded and looked up at him. He craned his neck so he could hold his lips to mine for one long, calming moment. In the corner of my eye, I saw Maura watching us still.
“Your upper extremities are probably going to lose all feeling because I am going to be squeezing you until this beastly contraption is on the ground,” I warned him, “All circulation is going to get cut off.”
“That’s okay. I’m tough. I can handle it.”
I nodded, squeezed my eyes shut, and burrowed further against his chest.
A faint shutter passed through the ship that caused people to mutter softly all around us. Before we could fully recover from the shock of feeling the ship move so strangely, it flew up into the air and crashed back down to the path it had been flying on before. When the ship jerked into the air again and plummeted into an even larger drop, the lights flickered, went out, and everyone in our housing compartment screamed in pure, heart-stopping terror.
I heard Penny crying out for me from the bed beside mine. My first instinct was to jump up and go to her, but the straps and James’s arms held me firmly in place. I was so selfish. I had been so concerned about my own anxieties that I had neglected Oenny. When I had found that they could strap two of us on a bed, I should have stayed with her.
“Penny! Penny!” I was screaming over everyone else.
“Oh my God, we’re going to die!” I heard Violet shrieking. “Oh my God! Maura! Maura!”
The ship was falling. We had broken through Pangaea's atmosphere and were falling to the hard ground too quickly to fathom. The whole ship would break apart on impact and our bodies would split with it. We had made it into space, flown so far from where we were from, and now, we were going to die in what was essentially a glorified plane crash.
“Penny, you’re okay! Penny, listen to me!” I was struggling to break free of the restraints so I could get to her. When I managed to maneuver one arm out, James held me to him even more tightly. I would have been able to squeeze out of the other restraints if he had slackened his grip on me. It was a good thing he was holding me, though, because the ship rose and fell abruptly again. The force sent us hurtling upwards again but the restraints, thankfully, kept us from flying right off of our beds.
“She’ll be okay.” James was assuring me calmly, “She’s fine. We’re all okay.”
He hadn’t realized it yet. He hadn’t realized that we were going to die. Everyone in the room was screeching in the dark, knowing that the end was near for all of us. The survivors of the human race were going to become extinct with the rest. A simple, terrifying fact stored in some deep corridor of my mind through which I never traveled shouted its message of despair and hopelessness to me at an eardrum-shattering volume: We had simply outrun the inevitable. We were meant to die with the others as the Earth burned. Death had caught up to us, knowing that a brutal higher power had demanded the eradication of the entire race. Death could not fail He or She or They who had created him...
My mind was racing, aiding my mind in forming erratic and eloquent thoughts. But no; I could not believe all of that. I could not believe that we had traveled so far only to die just as we reached Pangaea.
The ship gave another almighty lurch upwards, and my hands locked onto James. I held onto him with the last bit of strength left in my body. My eyes squeezed shut as I braced for the crash that would surely be my demise. I thought of what I would say to my parents upon seeing them. I could not think of any words but the three I had written on the paper.
It had been a lie.
We were falling again, our stomachs dropping as though we were on a thrill ride at an amusement park.
I heard a deafening screech that rattled everything, including our insides.
I could not breathe. I could not breathe.
I blinked in the total darkness.
Everything went black.

Quinn

We couldn’t even be sure if the ship was going to crash land on Pangaea or if we were falling into open space. Would we ever land? What was below us? What was above? There was no way to know.
The thought of falling forever in space, of being stuck in that stomach-churning drop for all eternity, made me want to close my eyes and beg for death. I wouldn’t be able to stand it for long. To fall forever, in my opinion, would be the absolute worst way to die.
Alice was crying, begging God to spare us. She rambled on and on, praying through her tears. I stared up into the thick darkness, widening my eyes in hopes of being able to see something. I hoped to see some indication that we had not reached the end yet. But even if the lights were on, all that would have been seen above me was the iron ceiling. There would be no angels assuring me that all would be calm in a few minutes. I didn’t have to decipher whether the tranquility they were promising would be reached in death or in just a few minutes when the ship miraculously evened itself out.
These are the thoughts that I had when facing my death. The animalistic instinct to get up and run was strong, yet I knew it was useless. There was no safe place to run if the ship truly was falling. The crash would be the end of everything. My heart pounded against my chest as I struggled to take a breath that would allow me to calm Alice. I didn’t know what I would say, but it would surely be empty promises that I couldn’t keep. Telling her that everything was going to be alright would be a lie. There is no way I could have known that for sure.
Is this how Alice’s parents felt while their souls were stuck inside of those creatures? Were they falling forever?
No, they were burning.
That thought certainly wasn’t soothing.
My parents had been killed trying to protect me. It was my fault. I should have been there.
I chose Alice.
Was that right?
I should have been there.
How had that thing killed them? There had been so much blood.
What had those things wanted? Why were they there?
Demons? I didn’t believe in them.
But if I had to picture a demon, those things came pretty close to the description.
We’re falling.
Falling…
Falling…
Where is the crash?
I squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for it, begging the higher power I didn’t believe in to gift me with a swift destruction where I felt no pain. But don’t all people pray for that? I wasn’t special. I had been lucky once and now, I would feel every last second of agony that the people we had left behind had suffered.
Silence. People had stopped screaming, including Alice.
“Allie?” I choked out. 
My mouth was dry, and my heart was still beating strongly in my chest.
“Are you okay?” Her voice was still quivering with the tears I couldn’t see falling from her eyes. “Are we… dead?”
“No. We’re not dead.”
People were beginning to mutter amongst themselves, trying to decide exactly what had just happened.
“Did you feel a crash? Are we still in the air?”
“I don’t know.” I replied as I struggled to sit up. The restraints on the bed held me down as they were supposed to.
“Where are the lights?”
“I don’t know, Allie.”
She cried harder.
“That was so scary.” She managed to whisper to me.
“It’s okay. I think that whatever it was, it’s over now.” I assured her with a firm calmness in my voice that I could barely muster.
“I wish I could see you.”
“I’m right here, baby.”
“Why haven't they made an announcement?”
“They will. Any minute now.”
We were silent, being forced to listen to other people creating all sorts of fanciful scenarios to explain what had just occurred. One man insisted that there were people on Pangaea who had been firing on our ship.
Okay, I mused, Whatever he brought on-board with him to smoke, I want some.
Despite the terror that was still inside of my chest, I couldn’t help but chuckle softly.
“What?” Alice asked me, and her voice was steadier now.
“Nothing. These people are funny.”
“Crazy is more like it.” She replied, “How did we get stuck in the freaking psych ward?”
“Maybe they saw your pissed-off face and assumed that you were a sociopath.”
“Okay, smart-ass, then why would they put you in here?” She asked, and I could hear in her voice that she was smiling. I grinned, too.
“They assumed I must be delusional given my association with a sociopath.”
“Shut up!” She exclaimed, “I will hand it to you, though, babe. You do always manage to make me laugh even in the worst possible situations. Even after we almost died...”
“That’s my job.”
The intercom beeped, and the familiar gravelly voice of the pilot came through.
“Sorry about the rough touch down, ladies and gentlemen. We have arrived on Pangaea. Someone will be by shortly to remove your restraints.” The man paused for a moment, perhaps unsure of what to say next. When he finished, it was with a statement said in unthinkable relief and vast disbelief:
 “We did it, folks. We survived the end.”

Violet

“Just hurry up!” I shouted at the man unstrapping me. Brynna had passed out in the midst of the ship's collapse from the air. After learning that she had almost suffered heart failure on take-off, I was more than a little alarmed. My anger at her still burned inside of me but that didn’t mean that I cared for her any less.
I would hate myself for the things I had said if anything happened to her now.
Once my arms had been freed, I shot up and forced my shaking hands to hurriedly undo the restraints on my ankles. Elijah was furiously unstrapping James and Brynna, looking as terrified as I felt.
“Does she have a pulse?” Maura demanded as she held Penny’s head against her shoulder so she couldn’t see Brynna. I couldn’t imagine how badly that would scar Penny, seeing someone she loved so much lost after such chaos.
James was cradling Brynna in his arms, his fingers pressed to her wrist. He nodded and let out a sigh of relief as he put his hand on her face.
“She just passed out.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t pass out. What the hell was that?” Elijah asked as he looked around the room with his hands rested on top of his head.
“I guess it was just a rough landing. They said we’re here.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose for a minute as I tried to calm myself down. “I just want to be clear about one thing…”
“Come on. That’s it.” James was sitting Brynna up as she came back around.
“…I will never get back on this ship. Ever.”
Elijah put his arm around my shoulder.
“You know I’ve always said that if the opportunity came up to travel through space that I would. But I agree with you. I don’t ever want to see the inside of this thing again.”
“After two and a half weeks of being stuck here, no one can blame you for that.” James replied absentmindedly as he kept Brynna’s chin cupped in his hand. He was observing her eyes, making sure that she was truly awake and not miles away in some quiet, crazed stupor. After the panic attack she had had, temporarily going out of her mind would not have been the unlikeliest of scenarios. It had happened to her before.
Brynna nodded before forcing her trembling legs to support her slight weight. Instantly, she stumbled back, only to be caught by Elijah and James.
“I just need a minute. I’m fine.” She blurted out a little too loudly.
When she slumped back onto the bed, Elijah sat down beside her, took her hand, and looked at her only until she held her other hand up close to his face, ordering him without words to look away.
“She’s fine.” Elijah assured us with a grin.
Her gesture was a certain indication that she was returning to normal. My eyes met Maura’s for a moment after I looked away from James, who had rested his hand on Brynna’s back. My heart jumped at the sight of the anger I found looking back at me. It was beyond the fury she felt at the things Brynna had said to her. It was also not channeled towards one recipient. It was channeled towards two.
Maura knew everything.
“Where are Penny and Violet?” Brynna's voice was quieter than normal not only because of how weakened she was from passing out but because she was talking to the floor; her head was down between her knees.
“I’m here.” I told her gently.
It was the first time I had been able to speak to her kindly since I had found out about our parents. I sat down on the other side of her and grasped her other hand in both of mine. She squeezed mine tightly for a moment, which took me by surprise. That was, in Brynna’s case, a show of love. That simple gesture required the same amount of affection a normal person would need to feel before she threw her arms around her loved one and cried in happiness at finding them in one piece after believing they were dead.
But after that momentary squeeze, she slipped her hand out from under mine.
“Alright. I am fine.” She stood up and swayed on her feet. Elijah and James grasped both of her arms to steady her. “We have come this far. Let us go see this planet already.”
I grinned now, excited trepidation brewing inside of me. This was it. This was the moment every person on the ship had prayed for, theorized about, and imagined in luminous, intricate details.
It was the end of the journey and the beginning of the beginning.

Part II: The Arrival

Brynna

By the time they opened the doors, everyone was silent. We were all aware of the tension in the air. The doubts that we were safe radiated through that uncomfortably thick silence. I could almost hear the collective beating of several thousand hearts.
There were too many questions to be asked. There were too many uncertainties. The journey there had been fraught with peril; some of us, myself included, had almost suffered fatal heart attacks from the sedative, the ship had almost plummeted out of the sky twice, and as people had grown more restless, the possibility of violence increased more than we could ever have been comfortable with. Finally, there we were, arriving at what we had been told was our salvation. But how could any of us believe that we were truly safe after that long, treacherous odyssey?
A buzzing noise sounded from the intercom, and the doors began to open. Here it was, the moment of truth. A stream of light blinded us all, even those standing far back in the crowd; we had spent so long in the darkness of space. Violet, at Penny’s behest, pushed us through so that we were standing near the front of the group.
“She wants to be the first to see it.” Violet had explained to me.
“Well, we will be the first to die if the air is toxic. So pump your brakes.” I had replied irritably, though I had certainly not directed such prickliness at Penny. Violet was the recipient of it, and rightfully so; was I the only one who considered the potentially dangerous outcomes of any and all situations?
I had overheard so many groups shouting that they wanted to be the first out. But the ominous burst of light seemed to have silenced even the most willful of those brave explorers. Since, thanks to Violet, we were so close to the front of the crowd, people behind us pushed us forward slightly. It became apparent that our proximity to the exit made us the guinea pigs. If we walked outside and burst into flames or fell over clutching our throats as we suffocated, they would know not to follow us.
I pictured us standing there for the rest of our lives, all too afraid to take the first step. There were too many different horrendous scenarios playing in each of our minds. We would be reduced to skeletal remains, each and every one of us, as the years of inertia passed. We would never know how it would have begun and ended on Pangaea.
“I’m going for it.” I heard Elijah say behind me, and I whipped around, my eyes wide.
“I am stunned that you would even consider such lunacy!” I spat at him in a livid whisper, “You have no idea what is out there!”
“Go for it, man.” A guy behind him urged. 
There was a rumble of assent through the crowd around us. The glares I shot in the direction of those people encouraging him actually silenced them; they probably feared being set aflame if I decided to turn the heat-intensity of my look up just one more notch.
“Brynna, come on. We’ll be the first people to set foot on Pangaea!” He said to me urgently as he gripped my hand. “We’ll be the first people ever!”
“I am very worried about your fascination with fame and momentous accomplishments. It seems both pointless and foolhardy.” I replied after my eyes had locked with his. After hearing this strange, intricately-worded sentence, a woman standing just behind Elijah looked at me as though she were witnessing a hydra regenerating one of its recently severed heads. I could not help it that I saw no need to edit myself for the sake of bystanders who felt uncomfortable in the presence of such vast intelligence and flawless articulacy…
“I’m going to do it.”
I could see in his eyes a resolution that would not be undone with any snippet of wisdom, sly insult to his intelligence, or even a command to use common sense. His resolve to be the first man to walk on this planet would not be shaken by the threat of death or dismemberment or even one of my elaborately formed warnings. I knew that.
I also knew that I could not let him go alone.
“Let’s do it.” I sighed in resignation. His goofy grin emerged, and I frowned. “Do not make me slap that ridiculous smile right off of your face.”
James grasped my hand, and when I looked up at him, he nodded.
“Keep Penny back,” I told Violet, “If anything happens…”
“Don’t say that!” She whispered back in a trembling voice.
A few more people stepped forward. I suppose their guilt at allowing two young, reasonably attractive, obviously quite intelligent kids and their strapping older chaperone to face what could be certain death was winning out over their own survival instincts. I couldn’t fault them for that. Either that, or they had overheard Elijah’s musings on being the first people to set foot on Pangaea and wanted their own slice of the immortality that such an accomplishment would bring.
On one side of us, a single man strode forward. The pupils set right in the middle of his impossibly large, unbelievably bright blue eyes were contracted to the size of pinpoints. He stared forward, his hands trembling as potent, petrifying fear coursed through his body. It was not his trepidation that was pulling him forward. It was not a need to know what awaited us outside. He was a slight man bearing a strong resemblance to a fly searching for something that would sustain his very life; he was of the group who desired the endless fame that came with being “one of the firsts.”
The woman walking beside me was shaking only slightly and grasping the cross necklace that hung around her neck. Her husband was muttering a soft prayer as he locked his arm around her shoulder. I would have been moved by their show of devotion to both each other and a  higher power if it weren't for the fact that every aspect of them (their appearance, their body language, the way the woman was closing her eyes and looking up to the heavens) screamed “performance.”
It screamed something else, too, but at that time, I did not know what. I never could have imagined it then. Not in a million years. 
I suddenly wished that there was some deity that I believed in strongly. I would ask for the bravery this slow forward-march required. But apparently, I didn’t need to pray, because my feet moved one after the other, inching me further and further into that mysterious light.
After releasing my grip on James and Elijah, I reached up to cover my eyes as the light brightened. I could not understand the sudden increase in its intensity but still, I walked forward.
The first breath of Pangaean air cast an icy spell over my lungs. It was a sensation so amazing, it brought tears to my eyes that had nothing to do with the bright light of a second sun. Even when I knew that my eyes had adjusted to that bright stream, I kept them closed for a moment longer, preparing myself for the image I knew would take those breaths of invigorating air away.
And take them away it did.
We had landed in a field covered by deep green grass. The blades reached towards the cerulean sky where overhead, the sun was blazing; it was a dazzling yet gentle ball of light. As I stared into its incandescence, my eyes did not burn in the slightest. I could stare right into its depth and feel nothing but wonder burrowed deeply in my soul coupled with confusion and mild, non-threatening confusion—How could we look right at the sun? In the distance, the sky darkened to purple and cradled stars inside that twinkled like drops of rain. We had arrived at twilight.
The air was light and crisp like the first day of autumn. It did not burn as it traveled down into my lungs the way the polluted air of our Earth had. I could not imagine returning to our planet, if it still existed, and having to breathe such toxic fumes. I believed that it would kill me immediately. It was a privilege to take those steady inhalations of such unimaginable purity.
I reached down to touch the grass that rose to my waist. It was not rough or sharp in either the body or the tip. It was as soft as silk in its entirety. I wanted to lie down and burrow my face in it. I wanted to use the earth as my pillow forever.
It was a truly astounding feeling, to see such untainted beauty.
This is what our earth was, I thought to myself, And we destroyed it.
When James and I had killed those giants that morning after our initial meeting, we had seen the world from my balcony the way it had been intended. Through our whitened eyes, we had seen the stolen truth. Now, we were living in a land that possessed the very beauty we had decimated. We breathed the air that we had forced from our world.
All five senses were alive; I could taste the sweet, clean air on my tongue. I could smell it so vividly as it traveled through my nose. I could see the hypnotizing beauty all around me. I listened to the wind swishing the tops of the trees in the forest that surrounded us and felt the grass as it danced against my legs and tickled my bare skin. Those first moments were, quite simply, indescribably glorious, and I have never forgotten them; to this day, they still instill in me a tear-provoking nostalgia and sometimes, a desire to return to that innocence and wonder.
After seeing that we were still standing, several people were rushing to exit the ship. I snapped out of my mesmerized daze and turned to see Penny, Maura and Violet being shoved forward, struggling to stay on their feet. The ship workers were trying to keep order, but the excitement had boiled over. Though the other survivors had not been able to see this place first, they surely would not wait to be the last.
I cleared my throat and took one large, fantastic breath of air. I stunned those who could see me by shouting in a voice too large and loud for a young woman my size.
“Everyone shut up and listen!”
Yes, that was graceless. But sure enough, the feet stopped stomping down the ramp, and silence replaced the excited chattering that had been deafening only a moment before.
Once all eyes were on me, I felt a familiar fluttering in my chest that turned my stomach. But the thrill of arriving and seeing such splendor was enough to remedy the sudden bout of sickness. I found my voice again.
“If you could not trample each other, I am sure those that would be trampled in this stampede would appreciate it greatly. Try for a little civility.” I paused, wondering if I should add that they were not surprising me with their barbarism. I debated mentally if I should comment on their sudden courage when earlier, they had been shoving us out of the ship to spare themselves. I thought better of both snide statements and instead allowed the joyful beating of my heart to overthrow my acidic disdain just for one instance. I finished my call for order with, “Thank you so much.”
The chattering resumed at its previous volume, but people walked slower and with more consideration for those around them. My eyes found Penny, who was walking between Maura and Violet, grasping both of their hands. Her eyes were wide in wonder. Her mouth was open, too, but a smile was tugging at the ends. In her face, I saw the amazement that I felt in my heart. It was child-like in its very essence. It was a feeling I had never known but was thrilled to see reflected in her.
“Elijah? Are you okay?” James asked him, and I whipped around, feeling a jolt of concern in my heart. Was this peace inside of me a lie? Did being exposed to this immaculate place cause a deadly side-effect that took several minutes to expose its ugly face?
No on both accounts.
Elijah had his head angled up towards the sky, and his eyes closed. He was in a state of amazement that rendered him speechless. This had always been his dream, to travel through space and see another planet. When we were kids, he insisted that he was going to live on the moon. Then, he insisted that he was going to live on Pluto, because no one gave it any credit. When “they” deemed Pluto too small to be a planet, Elijah vowed to campaign for its status to be reinstated.
The boy was a nerd, through and through. His passion for all things involving space rivaled my own passion for literature. He was more likely to show his love for what amazed and befuddled him whereas I kept mine to myself. Now, he was practically in tears.
I should have made a crack about his masculinity draining before our very eyes. I should have told him that if he cried, I would never respect him again. But an hour or so earlier, we had believed that we were falling out of the sky. Now we were safely on Pangaea, our safe haven. I could not fault him for wanting to shed some tears of relief and joy. So many people around us were, as they jumped about, hugging their family members and strangers, alike.
I certainly would have wept a little, if I had been a stronger person.
“He’s totally going to cry right now.” Violet leaned over to Maura and whispered that loudly enough so he could hear.
“I’m not going to cry!” He croaked out in shaky indignation, “Stop staring at me!”
“You heard the man. Look away, ladies.” Maura turned Violet and Penny away and paid me no mind, which had become custom since our disagreement. While Elijah was turned away, struggling to get his emotions in check lest he be viewed by all of us as a pansy, I rushed to James and threw my arms around his neck before standing up on the tops of my toes to kiss him for one long, brilliant moment. His arms came around my back, and he pulled me closer to him. Then, in a quick movement that elicited a yelp of surprise from me, he turned me sideways and dipped me backwards. I was laughing hysterically, amazed at how graceful the quick maneuver had been and how jokingly dramatic it was.
“Yeah, that was a good one, I know.” He bragged jokingly.
I laughed at his arrogant proclamation and pulled his face close to mine so I could kiss him passionately again.
The tumultuous sounds of the crowd around us faded out in my ears to be replaced by the sound of my heart pounding. That warmth that came with his touch blared to life inside of me. I was spoiled by it now and always dreading the moment when it died away.
It disappeared abruptly that time because I felt a light kick on my leg.
“Ow!” I exclaimed, though it was not the kick that was painful. It was having to emerge so quickly from that quiet, comforting place I fell into while I was with James that pained me.
“He’s going to turn around any second! Control yourself!” Violet hissed at me, but I could see the traces of a smile on her lips.
James returned me to my feet, but I kept my arms around his neck. His hands were still rested on my face as we pressed our foreheads together and laughed softly in quiet triumph and unfathomable relief. He kissed me for one quick, fleeting second.
Five thousand people were saved from whatever had taken our earth and the rest of our race. Though we had lost some in the journey, the rest had arrived safely with hearts still beating and lungs still breathing precious air. Like every creature ever to walk the earth, our will to survive had flourished in the face of death and saved us all. It had even beaten the very end of all we knew. In short, it had trumped extinction. In the battle against the sadistic will of God, the Gods, or the universe, we had won.
Looking around at the faces in that crowd of survivors and listening to their loud shows of joy, I could not help but feel a hope that was as alien to me as the planet on which we now walked. Doubt did not cast a shadow on my belief that from our arrival onward, we would live in peace until we met our own individual, not collective, ends.
I allowed myself to fall prey to naivety and idealism. That hope was something I never would have tolerated inside of myself otherwise.
It would prove false. It would carry consequences.
It shielded my eyes, quite perilously, to the coming events.

Quinn

I wanted to shake the hand of the girl who called out for civility, because Alice and I would have been trampled by the over-anxious crowd if she had not.  I couldn’t help but admire the girl's resolution to step out first when the rest of us had been so afraid. I wanted to approach her to give my thanks for her bravery. But she disappeared into the crowd that emerged from the ship. Once she was swallowed in the mass of people, I knew I’d more than likely never see her again.
“She’s got a loud voice for such a little person.” Alice said beside me.
“Yeah, she does.” I turned to her, grinning widely. “So, we’re here!”
“I know!” Alice clapped her hands excitedly and bobbed up and down on her feet for a moment of pure joy. “God, the air smells so much different than it did back home, doesn’t it?”
My mood dropped at the mention of home. It no longer existed, and the thought of it was sure to depress us both. Alice must have read that in my facial expression, because she quickly changed the subject.
“So now what?”
That question didn’t help keep the mood up, either. It was the newest question with unthinkable gravity behind it. We were there, finally, but what were we supposed to do first?
“We’re all going to sleep on the ship, right?” A man behind me asked.
“I guess we could,” A woman replied, “I hope they don’t expect us to sleep out here. You know that I’ve never liked camping, honey.”
“Well, if that’s the only option, then you’re just going to have to deal with it, sweetheart.”
“I don’t see why it would be the only option, David. They’ll let us sleep on the ship.”
“They’ll let all of us just keep running on and off the ship? Doubtful. People almost got stomped on a minute ago. Plus, can you imagine how long it will take if everyone decides to go in and out at the same time?”
“I don’t want to sleep on the ship, Quinn.” Alice told me after clasping her hands around one of mine.
“I don’t, either.”
The thought of having to stay confined to that ship at nighttime made my head spin. It was the same feeling I would experience if someone threw me in a trunk, slammed the lid shut, and locked me inside. After spending two and a half weeks on-board, I needed to be out in the open, and I knew Alice did, too.
“There are so many people!” Alice muttered as we looked around, “It’s like Rockefeller Center at Christmastime!”
“I don’t like it. Let’s try to move out of the crowd a little.
We had to squeeze past people as they argued and reasoned an answer to the question Alice had posed to me earlier. What exactly were we going to do now?
As a final answer, I heard an unfamiliar male voice over the loudspeaker.
“Ladies and gentlemen, can you direct your attention to the ship, please?” The man asked.
Alice and I looked to see that he was raising one hand in the air to show everyone where it was they were supposed to be looking. A hush fell over the crowd.
Though this was, without a doubt, the weirdest situation we could have found ourselves in, the universal quality to it was that people could rarely tell themselves what to do. Instead, they opted for the comfort of being told. Alice and I were no exception, but we could blame our age for that tendency, at least.
“Right here, ladies and gentlemen!” He strained himself to reach up higher and continued waving. “People in the back? Right here.”
Now everyone was giving him their full attention.
“Hello, everyone. We are going to be calling you by your housing compartment number. When your number is called, please come to the left side of the ship to gather your belongings. You will be given one tent per party. You will be given one set of matches, a set of rations, and a sleeping bag for every member of your party. We will be handing out rations daily at daybreak. The moment the sun comes up, one member of each party needs to be present to accept their rations. For your own sake, please do not be late.”
“Why would it matter?” I asked Alice softly.
“Shh!” She hushed me as she craned her neck to see the man speaking.
“It sounds like him.” A girl was whispering behind me, and I heard her jumping up and down as she tried to get a better look.
“You are imagining things.” Another girl hissed at her.
I drowned out their argument in order to hear the man better. He was speaking into a megaphone, but we were so far back that it was hard to hear. It was nearly impossible to get a good look at him.
“The ship is going to be closed off temporarily. Please remain within sight of it at all times. If you can’t see it, then you’ve gone too far, and you need to come back. Right now, we’re not sure if there is anything else here. There could be wild animals.”
“Are there people?” Someone in the crowd shouted. Some people laughed nervously, but the silence grew heavier with a sudden tension. Everyone was wondering that. It was not just a question, it was a fear we all shared.
“No, sir. Thank you for asking.” There was a note of irritation in the man’s voice, “Are there any other questions?”
“What will happen if we aren’t there at daybreak?”
“Just be there at daybreak.” The man insisted calmly.
“Why can’t we go off on our own?” Another man shouted.
“It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what’s out there. Ladies and gentlemen, there is strength in numbers. If there is a threat that we don’t know about, we will be more apt to survive it if we are all here to face it.”
One of the two girls who had been bickering behind us nearly shattered our eardrums with her deafening shout to the front.
“What’s your name?!”
“My name is Daniel Olivier. I paid for this ship to be built.”

Violet

I gasped sharply before storming straight ahead. In the process, I almost knocked the young couple in front of me to the ground as I ran forward. I pushed people and didn't bother to ask for their excusing. I knew Maura, Elijah, Brynna, James, and Penny were right behind me, but I didn’t look over my shoulder once, because I was in such a hurry to get to him.
“Daddy!” I exclaimed once I had reached the small stage he was standing on. I threw my arms around his neck, sobbing into his shoulder as he held me tightly.
“Hey, sweetheart. I knew you were here somewhere.”
“Why didn’t you come find us on the ship? We were registered. Why didn’t you come find us? She told me you were dead!” I pointed an accusing finger at Brynna whose face remained impassive. But if one were to look closely at her eyes, they would see the monstrous wrath burning behind that icy blue. I knew the look, and even in my elation, I felt a shudder pass through me; it always preceded one of her rages, that look…
My father’s face, however, was anything but expressionless. The smile that had emerged when he had seen us faded slowly. It was replaced by a fury so menacing that it almost matched Brynna’s. Her boldness never faltered, though, the way mine would have upon seeing that look. She stood firm and glared back at him, forcefully pushing his buttons, hoping that he would snap.
“Alright, we will deal with that later.” Maura said quickly, and they snapped their eyes to her at exactly the same time.
My dad reached out and put one hand on her face as she leaned forward. He kissed her cheek and she asked, “You alright?”
“I’m fine,” He replied softly, “Thank you for getting them here.”
Penny jumped into our dad’s arms, and he spun her in a circle. She giggled uproariously as she always did in those extremely rare instances that he played with her. Elijah, our dad believed, was far past the age where hugs were allowed, so they clasped hands quickly. It was a cold gesture that I had always found disturbing. It felt like whatever bond they had had before (and it had always been fragile) was permanently dead the day Dad decided he could no longer embrace Elijah. It’s a strange thing, when that happens between fathers and sons.
When it came time to speak to Brynna, he stared at her for a moment as she stared back.
“Come with me,” He ordered coldly, “I want to speak to you privately.”
“I do not want to speak to you, period,” Brynna snapped back without missing a beat, “so I will not be doing so.”
Oh, boy. Off they went …
“Don’t start that inane babbling with me. I said I wanted to talk to you. Now let’s go.” My anxiety was rising as he struggled to keep his temper. My mouth dried out, and my breaths stopped coming as easily despite the crispness of the air.
“I will not take orders from you. Not anymore…”
“There are people watching, Brynna Claire! Now move!”
“I am supposed to care that there are people watching? When have I ever cared about that, Dad?’
Everything, from the way she stood to the devious glint in her eye, told me that she was purposely trying to stir the angry storm inside of him. My father acted brutally towards Brynna only. I had never been on the receiving end of his wrath. But I knew the consequences of it by witnessing what he had done to Brynna over the years. She never gave in to him or showed any fear, which only strengthened his determination to hurt her.
Her fingers linked with James’s, and he snapped out of an angry daze of his own. He had been glaring at my dad, his eyes burning red. I wanted to warn him that he had better allow his eyes to switch back to normal unless he wanted Dad to know that some drastic, freakish change was occurring in each of us. Somehow, I knew that Dad learning of our evolution would be dangerous for us all.
“She told you that she’s not going. That’s the end of it. Let’s go, Brynna.”
“James Maxwell…” My father’s expression changed from one of deep discontent to one of pure loathing at the sight of him. His eyes traveled down to see their hands grasped together. “Somehow, I knew you would find her.”
What the hell was going on?
“You two know each other?” Elijah asked, “You said you’d never met them, James.”
“He lied.” My dad replied simply.
“I was just going to say that I lied.” James added abruptly, “I lied about meeting your dad, at least. I never made the acquaintance of your mother, and thank God for that.”
“Don’t you say anything about her, you…” My dad started, his anger hitting a violent high point far more quickly than ever before.
“Why would you lie about that? About knowing them? Or him, or whichever one of them you knew? Do you realize what that means?” Brynna was asking him softly, and yet her voice was shaking with anger.
“Brynna, let’s go.” Dad had turned his attention back to her and was obviously growing more and more impatient with every moment that passed.
“Daniel, can’t we just be happy that we’re all together and that we’re alright? There will be time to be angry later. Just let it go for right now.” Maura was urging him gently as she grasped his hand. He shook her off, still glaring at Brynna.
“How do you two know each other?” Brynna demanded, looking between the two of them, “I want to know the truth!”
“And I want you to come with me. Let’s go.”
“She’s not going with you.” 
Of the three, James was the most furious. His stature seemed to have grown; he had gained a sudden bulkiness that made him thicker and more intimidating. His eyes were burning red, and he didn’t seem to care that Dad saw. For his part, my father did not seem surprised by the change.
“Do you know what that is, Brynna?” My father asked as he pointed at James. “He looks like that because he feels that I’m impeding on his territory. It’s possession.”
“Well, I do not need anyone, let alone a liar, to protect me. You really feel the need to have a discussion? Then we will discuss.” 
“Brynna!” James called after her, but she was walking with my dad to the other side of the ship where they would be out of view of the gawking crowd. 
The onlookers had turned away after growing bored when they hadn’t been able to hear the whole conversation clearly, but if Dad reached out and hit Brynna the way he had a tendency to when he was angry, they would certainly turn back around to watch. An outburst like that certainly would not keep him in good standing with the survivors he was trying to lead.
I looked at Maura and saw tears in her eyes.
“I loved him once,” She whispered to me softly, or maybe she had whispered that to herself, because her eyes were on the ground, not on mine. She was swiping the tears from her eyes when she finally did look at me.
“I am sure you know that by now, that I loved him. But I loved him before he became what he is now.”
I nodded, barely understanding what she meant. I was too preoccupied with the fact that Brynna was about to see the worst of “what he was now.” The different man than the one Maura had fallen in love with was one that hated the very sight of his oldest daughter.
I was luckier to escape his wrath than I was to escape the end of the world. I knew that with absolute certainty.

Brynna

Because I was walking in front of him, I knew that he was going to grab my arm, twist it behind my back, and shove me up against the ship’s hard exterior before he did it. Because he was so angry, I knew he was going to hiss at me through clenched teeth to make his displeasure known. The only thing that I didn’t know was whether I’d be seeing the back side of his hand, something I hadn’t seen since I had moved out four years earlier.
“So, you thought that was it? You thought you’d leave your mother and me behind? You thought you’d escape here and shack up with that asshole, Maxwell?”
“How do you know him?” I demanded after realizing how very little fear there was in my heart, even in the presence of his rage. I only wanted to know where their association had begun and what the meaning was behind it. It was difficult for me to feel fear in the face of his anger anymore. I had become so accustomed to it that I found its theatricality and physicality almost comical; both were the result of his inability to simply articulate his undying hatred of me into words.
“You left us to die, you bitch!”
If there was one thing in life that I loathed most venomously, it was the use of gender-based insults. “Bitch”, “whore” and “slut” were disgraceful, but there was one more that was downright despicable. He had called me that before, generally after having one too many drinks.
“Where is my mother?” 
I refrained from referring to her as “Mom” for I felt that the term was too closely correlated with warmth and sentiment. I had been doing that for years, simply because it irritated them both so much.
“Where do you think?! She burned up just like I was supposed to! Isn’t that what was supposed to happen? Well, you should have done your homework, sweetheart, because this whole expedition was bought and paid for by me! What, your little friend James didn’t tell you that? Was he too busy following after you like a pathetic little puppy dog?”
“You enjoy asking rhetorical questions, though I must say, I have always found them to be quite useless in determining what one wants to know...”
“Shut up!” He punched the side of the ship right beside my head. I only flinched slightly, which only infuriated him more. “I guess he also didn’t tell you that he engineered the ship?”
Well, that explained his calmness while the rest of us thought the ship was going down... That explained his calmness that had remained intact throughout all the peril we had experienced, actually.
“Now I want you to listen to me. Stay away from him.”
He had lied to me. I would have nothing more to do with him for that alone, not because my father had ordered me to keep my distance.
“If I catch you with him, I’ll deal with it the same way that I dealt with your stupid little friends.”
I looked at him, knowing that my eyes were going to turn red. It was that rage again. It was that inescapable feeling that I must end the life of someone causing me pain. For my pride, for my love of the people to whom he was cruelly and disrespectfully referring, for the years upon years of hatred and abuse between us, for that longing and love for the one he stole away from me, I would end that man.
“The two that couldn’t keep their noses out of your mother’s business went easily. The other two, not so much… Your little friends, I don’t even remember their names. And God, I don’t even remember the names of those two little bloggers now, either, and you were screwing one of them, weren’t you? God, what was her name, Brynna?” He continued to prod me with a sadistically triumphant smile scratched across his misshapen mouth. 
His inability to recall the names of four innocent people he had ordered to be killed, three of which were so dear to me, sickened me worse than if he had spat their names at me in blatant disrespect for them. As far as her, I had tried my hardest not to think her name, or to see her face, or to remember all that had happened… Tears rushed into my eyes, but I blinked them away. I only saw her when my mind was unguarded in sleep, when her face could assail me at my most vulnerable moments…
Rachel. Rachel. Rachel. 
I was beginning to panic. Those many painful feelings that only her death could provoke me to feel were utterly destroying the walls I had built in an effort to keep them out. He was destroying those walls, talking about her.
To his eye, though, I was still calm, vaguely sociopathic in my calmness. That is what he thought, anyway. With a surprisingly low level of surprise, I realized that I could hear what he was thinking. How could his barbs not be hitting me? How could I not be sobbing under the weight of his cruel words, of his forceful evoking of painful memories, his whole act of emotional torment? Why was I so damn unshakeable? He would break me. If he could not break my composure, he could break my bones; whatever he had to do, he would wipe that impassive look off my face. He would replace it with a look of fear or at the very least, a grimace of pain.
“You’re my daughter.” He hissed, his hands shaking violently now. “I might find the sight of you to be disgusting, but you’re still my kid. So, do you want to guess which option I’m going to favor when I get rid of him?”
I was through with James. I was ready to pretend that nothing had occurred between us. But the thought of losing him permanently, though I knew I would never be with him again, almost brought tears to my eyes. Tears streaming down my cheeks were as rare a sight as a unicorn tumbling out of a rainbow above Antarctica, so I hope one realizes how extreme the pain I felt was when I pictured James being irreversibly gone.
I hated him for lying to me. But I could not hate him completely. It made no sense, and to me, everything made sense. I did not find the confusion regarding my feelings for him to be a place in which I wished to spend my time. I shook my head slightly to clear the rambling, conflicting thoughts from my mind.
Everything was so loud. Within the confines of my skull, the thoughts were expanding, overlapping, feeding off each other to cause me the most pain.
“Tell me that you’re not going to see him again.”
I did not reply. I was proud to the point of recklessness and always had been. Even now, as I faced the possibility of physical pain, I could not cast my pride aside. It was too resilient, like the cockroaches I assumed were still scavenging amongst the ashes of our earth.
“Brynna Claire,” He growled as his fingers locked painfully around my upper arms. “Do not test me. I don’t like raising my hand to you, but I will if you don’t answer me. You’re smarter than this. Make the smart decision. Tell me you won’t see him again.”
I raised my eyes to him, fantasizing about reaching out abruptly and shoving my palm up into his nose with all the force my newly acquired strength would allow. The bones would shatter, and a jagged piece would be shoved up to pierce his brain. I wanted to lean forward and take an unforgiving bite out of his throat, right on that quickly throbbing, deep-blue vein. I wanted to jump on his back, grasp his head and rip it from his neck, destroying him the same way I destroyed that creature in my apartment.
Instead, I taunted him:
“Raise your hand, little boy.”
His hand came up, and he moved it behind him so that he could muster enough force to send me to the ground. I’ll admit, the pain evoked a small cry from me. I crashed sideways into the side of the ship before sliding down into the dirt. Looking up in time to see James suddenly appear in front of me did not improve my now very disagreeable mood.
“Go. Go away.” I gasped out as I widened my eyes in an attempt to clear my blurred vision. He was sitting me up. “You lied to me, and I want you to go.”
“Brynna, I lied to you because I knew you wouldn’t trust me. If you knew that I had worked with him to build this, you wouldn’t have come with me. We did vote on whether or not to allow them to come. We voted against them both, just like I said. I don’t know what he’s doing here. I thought you’d be safe from both of them here.” He was speaking quickly, trying to explain away committing the ultimate betrayal in my little world before I managed to hoist myself up and leave him forever.
“So you thought you’d save me, James?” I narrowed my eyes as a new outrage gripped me that had nothing to do with my father.
How dare he suggest that I needed to be rescued? I was a strong, independent woman who just so happened to be abused, sometimes severely, by her father. That didn’t mean that I was weak and in need of a knight in shining armor, as they say. How incredibly pathetic that would be…
His own defenses rose abruptly; coldness glazed over his warm, brown eyes, and his perfectly molded jaw tightened. The armies inside of us were raising their weapons, ready to fire on the enemy that had invaded their strongholds. We were pulling away just as we had begun to grow closer.
Deep down, past the anger, the betrayal, and the self-loathing I felt at allowing myself to grow too fond of him, my heart was splitting. I dreaded the moment he walked away from me. I prayed that somehow, I would find whatever was needed to change my mind; I searched desperately for some inner strength that would persuade me to let him stay. No revelation of the sort came, nor did my swelling pride dissolve.
“I told you that you would pull away,” He told me furiously, “You thought it would be me. But I knew it would be you.”
“Congratulations. Would you like some sort of award for your vast knowledge on the inner workings of Brynna Olivier?” I hissed back just as viciously.
“It is quite an accomplishment considering that you’re so fundamentally f…”
“This conversation has reached its end. I do not tolerate liars.”
“But you tolerate that son of a bitch, who just punched you in the face?”
“He’s my father. You’re… You’re…” I was stammering, a new phenomenon with which I was not familiar nor comfortable. The sudden change in my speaking pattern was evidence that I did not mean what I said next, “You’re nothing, James.”
He studied me as he shook his head slightly. I wanted to see anger on his face and the desire to fight me on my resolve to push him away. Doesn’t every woman want that? But all I saw in James’s face was a new determination to get as far away from me as he could, and to stay away this time.
My heart split even more fatally. I was surely bleeding to death internally. The part of me that cared for him so deeply and needed him blindly begged me through her rapidly falling, acidic tears to reach out, wrap my arms around his neck, and beg him to stay. Unfortunately, the side of me that did not allow such fragility to be shown to anyone, but especially men, crossed her arms, shook her head and dug her heels in. She would not beg James Maxwell for anything. She would not beg anyone for anything.
“Good luck to you, Brynna.”
His words were so cold. They were so final. There was not the smallest hint of that beautiful affection I knew he had for me. Over the past several days, a devotion to one another had bloomed in each of us. Mine was wilting away as though its water-source had been evaporated with one harsh ray from the sun. His was effectively eradicated; I wondered if even the smallest traces of it would survive for even an hour more.
My father ushered me back to the crowd, and I turned to watch James walking in the opposite direction, getting further and further away by the second. There were so many people. If I ever needed to find him, I would more than likely be unable to do so. That was the last time I would see him, ever.
I walked back to where Maura, Elijah, Penny, and Violet were standing together and chattering nervously. Only Penny comforted me with a warm hug around my leg and a kiss on my throbbing cheek when I knelt down in front of her. The rest just diverted their gazes and pretended not to notice the bruise that was already forming there.
“Your eyes are really dark blue.” Penny told me with her brows furrowed in curiosity. “Normally, they’re the color of the sky. Now they’re like the ocean.”
I was barely listening to her, God bless the sweet little girl. In my ears was the rhythmic tapping of my heart, and the last words James had spoke over and over again, and Rachel’s name, her voice. James’s voice.
I forced it away. I forced that immense, unimaginable pain away. I allowed myself just that one moment of agony as I replayed the exact second when he had disappeared from my sight over and over again.
I cannot explain it. I cannot think about it for long. The memory pains me still.

Quinn

Our housing compartment had been the very last, so by the time we got to the ship to retrieve our bags, people had already made their camps. The lucky people who had resided in the first compartment were able to set up right in front of the ship. We were forced to set up far in the back, closer to the tree line at the end of the field.
I had very little experience with camping, though my father had insisted that we try it when I was a little kid. Though my tent-constructing skills left a lot to be desired, I managed to build ours in under two hours. Of course, I had required the assistance of a woman from the camp next to ours.
“Too bad we got the last compartment, right? We’re all the way back here in the nosebleeds.” She had told me as she expertly hammered a peg into the ground.
“I know, right?” I replied, “I guess we’re second-class citizens.”
“I guess so.” She looked up at Alice, who was standing away from us and staring off into the darkened forest. The leaves on the trees were a dark evergreen; the sight of them made me tired for some reason. The forest was odd; every type of tree I could think of was cluttered together in my view. A weeping willow swayed in the wind, its long, flowing leaves grazing the rough trunk of a tall palm tree. A pine tree stood in the shadow of a towering oak. I couldn’t help but muse how weird this place was.
“Your girlfriend looks like she has had a bit of a rough time.” The woman informed me.
My thoughts snapped back to Alice, who remained motionless as she stared straight ahead. I wondered what exactly she was looking for, or if she was really looking for anything at all.
“We all have, right?” I replied with a noncommittal shrug, “Yeah, it’s crazy to say out loud, but there was this thing back home. I can’t describe to you exactly what it was. I just know that it was evil. It sounds crazy…”
“It doesn’t,” The woman shook her head, “I’m the chatty one out of me and my sisters, and I talked to a lot of people on the ship. We all had something after us. You and your girlfriend aren’t alone in that. What was your otherworldly stalker like?”
I chuckled softly at the term. “Otherworldly stalker” was an accurate description.
Though the recollection was painful given the way it all turned out, I found myself spilling all of the details to this stranger. I talked for a long time, and she never interrupted me. She never gave any indication that she was disturbed, even when I finished our story with the very real, very grim end.
“That’s horrible,” She told me, but her voice betrayed no true sympathy, “I guess her zoning off instead of helping you make camp is acceptable then. Poor thing…”
I didn’t know whether to be offended by her suggestion that Alice was essentially a useless companion or to ask myself if I had taken her statement the wrong way. I certainly didn’t believe that Alice not helping me make camp made her useless, though I had been slightly irritated at her as I was sweating and stressing over how to build a stupid tent.
“Baby!” I called to her. “It’s done!”
Alice jumped almost completely off the ground.
“Sorry!” I shouted again.
She gave no acknowledgment of my apology. She just meandered back slowly, glancing over her shoulder every couple of seconds to view the trees again. When her face became clearer to me as she got closer, I could see that her brows were wrinkled, and her mouth was crooked in an expression of curiosity and bemusement.
“Thank you. It was nice talking to you.” I told the woman, who nodded and studied Alice with narrow eyes. After she walked away, I reached out to grasp Alice’s hand.
“What is it, baby?” I put my finger under her chin to gently lift her head.
She glanced back over her shoulder, her eyes slowly scanning the trees.
“There’s something out there,” She told me, “I can feel it.”
She didn’t elaborate. She just unzipped the tent and went inside.
“It’s really big in here!” She called out to me, but I was looking into the darkness behind the tree-line now, looking for whatever it was that she claimed she felt. After a minute, I was able to convince myself that she was still stressed from the events of the past weeks and as a result, was imagining things. There was nothing out there.
I followed her into the tent to see her sitting on the ground, opening her suitcase.
“I want to keep at least one shirt in my bag. I don’t want to wear it.” She told me as she cradled a pink and black striped flannel to her chest. “I just want to keep it in my bag so that it will always smell like home.”
“That’s a good idea.” I replied as I opened the box of rations that we had gotten at the same time we retrieved our bags. “Well, at least the food on the ship was good, because this is all kinds of crap. Look at this!”
Though the proportions were quite large, the food itself was basic. It was only meant to supply the necessary nutrients. It was just enough to survive.
“Just add water. Where are we supposed to get water?” I asked as I held up a can of what I supposed was powdered soup.
“Look a little harder, darling.” Alice told me as she rooted around in the box to pull out three bottles of water. “Look, they gave us the bare minimum! One gallon a day each!”
“That was generous of them.” I replied bitterly.
I was a typical guy; I underwent a Jekyll and Hyde transformation when I became hungry or thirsty. If I was in desperate need of a drink or meal, I was also in desperate need of a straitjacket. A smart person would promptly avoid me at all costs.
“The extra bottle is for the stuff that needs water, I guess.” Alice told me. “So, do you want some powdered soup? I’ll cook it for you. It’ll be like I’m a housewife, right?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Do you even need to ask?” She asked sarcastically, “I’m only kidding. But seriously, I will make it. Let me test my survival skills right here and right now.”
“You’re testing your survival skills by following a simple direction?” I laughed slightly.
“I am. Don’t rain on my parade.”
“Sorry.” I watched her pour the packets of soup into two plastic bowls. She poured in a small amount of water and stirred the contents with a plastic spoon, “I guess the days of nice silverware and plates and bowls are over.”
“Do we really need them, though? I think fine china and silverware are the least of our worries.”
“I know. I was just making a statement.”
“Here you go. That was like magic. I turned powder into soup. Think about it this way…” She took a bite of the chunky green liquid in the bowl and frowned. “When we went away to college, we would have been eating Ramen every night. We probably would have been using Styrofoam bowls and plastic cups and washing them every night because we couldn’t even afford paper plates. We’re basically living the exact way we would have been living at the end of the summer.”
“You’re trying really hard to stay positive, aren’t you?”
“Do I have any other choice?”
“No. I guess not.” I knew that I needed to get on that fake-optimism bandwagon quickly, or she would break down into tears. She needed my assurance the same way I needed hers. “We’ll chill here for a while until we get to explore. Then, we’ll figure out a way to get some wood, and I’ll build you our house.”
Her face had fallen slightly after she had tried to remain upbeat. Her true feelings were beginning to leak through that mask of happiness. But at the mention of our house, I saw joy on her face that was genuine and familiar to me.
“Maybe we’ll learn to make pots out of clay and stuff.” She replied enthusiastically, “Then you can have your nice plates and bowls.”
“I don’t need plates and bowls!” I laughed again, “I was being dumb.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
I shook my head at her in jocular offense and then leaned forward to kiss her.
“This could all shape up to be really, really cool,” She told me, and I knew that her proclamation was an optimistic thought she truly believed in. “I mean, we’ll just get to chill out for the rest of our lives. No one is going to expect us to work if we’re living on our own. We don't need money for anything. We’ll get up in the morning, decide that we don’t want to do anything, so we won’t do anything.”
“Is this proof that all people are lazy?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” She said through a fit of gleeful laughter, “I believe that, Quinn. I believe it’s everyone’s dream to do nothing. Isn’t that why people started retiring early and moving to Florida and stuff? Why would you work when you can just run around on the beach all day? Look at us. We hadn’t even started working for real, and we were already fantasizing about the day we didn’t have to work at all anymore. It just so happens that our time to do nothing has come a lot earlier than we planned.”
“That’s true. It’s weird to hear it put like that, but you’re right. Do you remember how my dad used to talk about how lazy our generation was?”
“Oh, yeah,” Alice smiled as she rolled her eyes, “I remember those lectures. I just wanted to be like, 'It’s your generation that got us into a crisis, ding-dong!’”
“And it’s their generation that didn't want to work, either. People were losing their jobs left and right, and there were still people who didn’t appreciate having good ones. Do you remember how your mom used to threaten to quit every week? And she was making a ridiculous amount of money!”
“I know. She annoyed me so much with that. Then I’d try to tell her about how she should consider herself lucky. And she was like, 'Alice, if you knew what I had to do at my job…’ ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about…’”
Her impression of her mother was spot on.
“Laziness, dude,” She continued, “She was the prime example of it. That was one of her bad qualities, I will say.” Alice’s smile faded as she looked off, “But I would want her here even if she had only her bad qualities.”
“I know. I want my parents here, too. They should be here.”
“I know they should. But you know, I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to see them again. One day, when I die…”
“Which will be in a really long time…” I added.
“Which will be in a really long time,” She agreed, “I’ll see them again. It helps more than I thought it would.”
“I know it does.  You know that I have no religious beliefs. But I’ve been thinking that a lot lately, too. And it is comforting.”
“It is. So we just need to live out our lives being as happy as we can be. Even though they didn’t approve of us, and they probably never would have, they know that we need each other now. So, we just need to try to live normally even though God knows this situation isn’t normal.”
“You’re right.” I smiled at her, completely in agreement with what she had said, “You’re absolutely right.”

Violet

“Sick” does not begin to describe how I felt when I saw my father and Maura together. I knew that they had a history, though the extent of their relationship remained a mystery to me. Now, with my mother so recently deceased, he was beginning to revisit his old bond with Maura. Besides the betrayal to my mom, the way Maura fawned over him was enough to make me gag.
There were constant compliments on her end that only boosted his already out of proportion ego. She made excuses for what he had done to Brynna, saying that it was Brynna’s own fault. Had she not been so cruel as to leave our mother behind, my dad wouldn’t have been so keen to sort her out.
“It was wrong, what she did,” She told me one morning over breakfast. I was staring off into the distance as the Pangaean sun rose over the top of the ship and blanketed us with its gentle light. “You said so yourself. I don’t believe in hitting any of you. But what she did was purely wrong, Violet. You know that it was, if we are being completely honest, almost evil! He was upset. He acted out in anger.”
“Maura, it’s not like this is the first time it’s happened. He’s always been meaner to her than he is to us,” I insisted, “And since when does she ever listen to him? He tells her to stay away from James, and James is gone now.”
“And that’s for the best! He had to assert his authority there. She may be an adult, and she may mature, but she cannot handle a relationship with a man his age. The poor girl can barely connect with anyone, let alone a man who comes with expectations and experience behind him.”
“Brynna can handle anything, Maura, and you know it!”
“I know that you think so. Where did this sudden change of heart come from? A couple of days ago, you were screaming that you wanted her to die. I do not agree that you should have said that, by the way. I never told you that I feel that was far too harsh.”
“Why are you so ready to excuse what Dad did? Back home, when he treated her like that, you’d always excuse it, and you’re doing it again!”
“I told you, what Brynna did was absolutely, undeniably wrong. He was acting out of anger…”
“It wasn’t out of anger!” I exclaimed, and the bowl I was holding shattered in my hands despite my loose grip on it.
“Violet Mae!” Maura reached out and pulled the shards from my hands, cutting herself in her haste to dispose of them before my father saw.
“It wasn’t out of anger, Maura. He has always done this. She should run away. If I were her, I’d run as far away from him as I could!”
“So, what, are you going to run away now?” Maura asked as she held a paper towel to the cut on her palm. I watched her blood soak through the pure white of the towel, billowing outwards to the very edges like a visible plague.
“He doesn’t treat me like that. But if he did, I’d be gone. Maura, you’ve never stuck up for her. She needs you to defend her.”
“Brynna doesn’t need anyone to defend her. She’s a Viking woman. She always has been, even as a small child. When she still lived at home, I tried to keep him calm so that he wouldn’t hurt her. She’s older now and can handle herself. If I tried to handle this for her, especially with how strained things are between us right now, she would tell me to butt out in colorful terms, and that would be the end of it.”
“Elijah is angry. He said he wanted to kill Dad.”
“That was worrisome the first time he said it all those years ago.  He’s said it too many times since, and it has lost its effect.”
Her cavalier attitude towards the whole situation made me want to claw out my hair and scream at the sky. Now that my father was showing her the slightest bit of attention, even his abuse of the girl Maura had always thought of as her daughter wasn’t entirely wrong, at least not in Maura’s narrow view.
Our mother never would have tolerated it, despite what Brynna might have believed.
“Our mother was a not only a permissive parent, but a permissive wife.” Brynna said behind m,e and I turned to see her lying on her back in the grass, a cigarette burning in the hand whose back was pressed to her forehead. I stood up and knelt down beside her. She brought the cigarette to her lips and took a drag, but her eyes never opened beneath her sunglasses. I tried not to look at the dark black bruise on her slightly swollen cheek.
“How did you…”
“I just did.” She replied through a sigh, “You are worried about me. You needn’t be.”
“Brynna, you’re older now. You don’t have to tolerate him. I change my mind about James, okay? If you want him, go be with him. Just don’t let Dad hit you anymore!”
“James lied to me, and I will not forgive him for it. You know better than anyone just how intolerable I find those who lie. Dishonesty is for the weak. You know how I scorn weakness.”
Well, she was back to normal. I knew, deep down, that those especially complex sentences and sentiments were the result of her desperate attempt to hide her true feelings. I didn’t call her on it, though I should have. Perhaps if I had exposed her created ruse, she would have been spurned into action.
“I do not even know where he is, so even if you did tell me what you believe my words are masking, I would have no course of action.”
“Brynna, stop it!” I exclaimed angrily. I covered my ears as though my secret thoughts were tumbling out of them, moving across the space between us, and whispering to her.
“I cannot help it,” She replied dully, “Your thoughts are very loud. Can you hear mine?”
“No,” I shook my head, feeling like crying all of a sudden, “I haven’t heard yours since that first time, right after Miranda...” A shudder passed through me, and I reached out to grasp the hand she had rested on her stomach. She startled at my touch but hid her surprise immediately.
“Brynna, you’ve never had a weak moment in your life. Why are you being so calm about all of this? Why are you letting him treat you like this?”
“It was one instance of a pathetic man utilizing his superior physical strength to get his point across. He could not do it with harsh words the way that I can. He can only use his hands, like a little elementary school boy striking out at a bully on the playground.” She giggled humorlessly, “It is pathetic.”
“What does that have to do with anything that I just said?” 
Tears were leaking from my eyes now. I couldn't understand what was wrong with her.
“I am not going to run from one I deem insignificant. He does not scare me. He is an annoyance and an inconvenience but nothing else. In fact, I find his appointment as leader of this band of ragtag survivors to be incredibly entertaining. I do so want to see how it all plays out.”
“You miss James! That’s why you’re being like this!” I accused her before putting both hands on her face and shaking her slightly. Instantly, she pushed my hands away. After sitting up, she pointed at me.
“Do not mention his name to me again! I will not tolerate being lied to! I had every right to know the truth about him from the very beginning. Instead, he lied to me! Do not bring him up again, Violet!”
She jumped up, straightened her tank top and her shorts, and huffed off.
I put my face in my hands and cried. They were the first tears that I would shed on Pangaea. Many more would come over the years, but the tears that streamed down my face that day were among the most painful.
They came when I realized that my sister was losing her fight. It was being stolen from her by our father, whom I loved tremendously but hated at the same time for what he was doing. I could not stand his violent treatment of her or the way she was beginning to submit to it. I wondered briefly if she was punishing James in her own way by allowing herself to suffer. If she was in pain, and he knew it somehow, his guilt over being unable to protect her would drive him insane.
No, my mind told me gently, She’s punishing herself for getting so close to James.
For once, my inner voice was right on the money.
The conflicting emotions were far too complicated for a girl my age. Through them I could see one solution, clear as the Pangaean morning:
I had to find James.
***

I set out later that afternoon with my small backpack slung over my shoulder. In it, I had packed just one bag of dried bananas and half a bottle of water. I didn’t assume that I would be gone that long. Maura was distracted because she was trying to entertain Penny, who was growing bored with having nothing to do. Sure, she had made friends with some of the other kids. They kicked a soccer ball around the open space several feet to the left of our collective campsite, and they built dirt mounds for people to step in. But she missed the comforts of television and swimming in our pool. They were luxuries she had grown used to that no longer existed. I could certainly sympathize.
I didn’t assume that it would be hard to find James. However, after an hour of searching, I sat down in a particularly soft-looking patch of grass and put my head on my arms. The smell of some sort of meat wafted over me; I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. A group of people whose origin I could not determine right off were cooking up meat taken from an oversized rabbit whose skins now adorned the outer wall of their tent. I grimaced but then almost shrugged. Just because I couldn't stand to eat a cute rabbit didn't mean that other people couldn't, if eating said cute rabbit would ensure their survival.
I had asked many people if they knew where James was, only to be told that my description was too generic and could fit anyone. I would try to tailor it to specifics when I addressed the boy who was now walking in front of me.
“Hey!” I called out, and he stopped walking. He turned to look at me in curiosity.
“Hey. Are you lost?”  He asked, and I was stunned by his beautiful green eyes.
Stay focused, Violet, I urged myself.
“No. I’m looking for someone. His name is James Maxwell. Have you heard of him?”
“No,” The boy replied, and with genuine remorse in his voice, he added, “Sorry.” He went to keep walking, but I jumped up and hurried after him.
“Maybe you’ve seen him. He’s about 6’1, muscular, with brown hair that he keeps gelled so that it looks messy, but it’s really styled. That's really the only way that I can describe it...”
The boy chuckled softly.
“What is he going to do when his hair gel runs out?”
It was a valid question but a random one.
“I don’t…” I started to say, but then I shook my head slightly and brought us back to the topic at hand, “He has dark brown eyes. He’s really sarcastic and funny. He has a goatee slash five-o-clock shadow thing going on. Is any of this ringing a bell?”
“Good-looking guy?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, “He’s really good-looking. He’s kind of a prick sometimes, too. Maybe you’ve run into him?”
“James, James…” He turned the word over on his tongue as though taste-testing a foreign food. He looked up at the blue sky, squinting slightly in the bright sunlight. “I really feel like I know who you’re talking about. I ran into a guy the other day who helped me fight off some assholes trying to steal my water. He fits the bill. I was so freaked out, though, that I don’t remember what he said his name was. He was looking for a fight though, by the look on his face.”
“How many days ago was this?”
“Two.”
Two days had passed since Brynna had told James to leave and never come back. Perhaps he had been so heartbroken by her abrupt dismissal that as he walked along, looking for someplace to settle down, he had stumbled across this boy being robbed and used the opportunity to relieve some of his stress. It made me sad to think about, despite the fact that I was still angry at him for what he had done to my mother and father. My anger was doubled when I thought about how he had lied to Brynna. She was so distrustful already, and he had given her a reason not to trust him or anyone else. I did not want to ponder, even for a moment, the implications such a lie presented for her. Would she ever trust him or any other man again?
In thinking about that, my heart sank as a new revelation gripped me. Even if I found James, Brynna wouldn’t care. She had exiled him from her life, and once that happened, there was no coming back. Her stubbornness would never fail her. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, I knew that James had hurt her deeply. She would not leave herself open to being hurt by him again.
But I had to find him. I had to get him to make her snap out of her submissive daze. It had driven me half-insane, but while she was with him, she was even sassier than normal. She was the strongest I had ever seen her. I needed James to awaken that strength in her. At the very least, he needed to help her find it again. The rest she would do on her own.
“We talked for a while, this guy and me.” The boy continued, and I noticed for the first time that he had a slight accent. I couldn’t peg exactly where he was from just by listening, though. “After he got my water back. He really hurt those other guys. But they’ve been doing this to a lot of people.”
“These guys have been stealing water and stuff from a lot of other people?”
“Yes,” He nodded grimly, “People are not as civil as that man with the megaphone would have us believe.”
“What else has been happening?”
Damn me and my journalistic mind! I always had to know the gritty details, and I always regretted learning them once they were told to me.
“Well, supposedly a woman got…” He trailed off and looked at me. I think, for the first time, he realized that I was a girl, and he should tread carefully with what he said. But I was an equal opportunist, in conversation and otherwise, so I urged him to continue truthfully.
“Don’t beat around the bush. I can handle it.”
“Well, a woman was raped two nights ago. First night, and someone was already getting assaulted.”
I don’t know why I wasn’t surprised.
“What happened to the guy that did it?”
“Another woman and her husband chased him off. They didn’t get a good look at his face, though, because we had put out our fires. I don’t know why we’re supposed to put them out so early.”
“Supposedly, they know for sure now that there are animals out there, and they don’t want them to be attracted to the light.” I almost repeated my father’s explanation verbatim.
“Well, this woman reported what happened to someone at the top.”
“At the top.” I turned the phrase over in my mind, realizing that a hierarchy had been established, and I was perched on top of it. That gave me no joy or satisfaction. The severity of the divide between people of power and the rest of us at home had been part of the reason for the world’s destruction. Now, the seeds were being planted here on Pangaea; they were weeds growing amongst pure white flowers in those soft fields of grass.
It was beginning again. The thought was too heavy to contemplate in full detail at that moment.
“They told her they’d make a point to try to find those men. But we haven’t seen any of them looking around.”
“Probably because they’re too busy congratulating themselves on being able to pull this off.” I replied bitterly before walking a little faster. “Well, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that things like what happened to that woman and to you will keep happening if they don’t do anything to stop it. My sister told me that people have always been enamored by the idea of the end of the world. Well, she actually says that it’s more the end of civilization that people are fascinated with.”
“Why does she think people are fascinated with something so terrible?”
“Because after it’s over, she says there are no laws. There are no expectations. People can get in touch with their animal nature to survive. If that means killing someone over a loaf of bread, then so be it. There’s no one to arrest you. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“That actually makes perfect sense. I was expecting some crackpot religious theory when you said your sister believed that people wanted the world to end.”
“No. My sister runs from religion the way the rest of us run from rabid dogs. What was the exact religious theory you had in mind, though?”
I was curious to know if his theory that he deemed so crazed was the same as one I had thought up in my own mind. Of course, I believed my theory to be perfectly sane.
“Well, some would say that people are fascinated with the world ending, because they know, that through being wiped off the earth by God or the Gods, depending on your religion, that at least they’re looking at you. At least God or the Gods are paying attention. Some people want to die in the apocalypse, because they know that their death is a righteous one. Their death is all part of the plan.”
“That’s deep,” I told him after a minute of silence, “My sister would like you. In fact, it’s weird that you would say ‘God or the Gods,’ because she says that all the time. So, she’d really like you, actually. She likes opinionated, interesting people.”
“And you think I’m interesting?”
“That was an interesting theory,” I smiled slightly, “Definitely up there with some of the crazier ones I’ve heard. But then, it’s not so crazy. I’m sure there are people like that. But yeah, if you ever run into her, tell her that one. Her name is Brynna.”
“And what’s your name?” He studied me with those beautiful eyes of his.
I smiled even bigger now, my face flushing red. His smile was as beautiful as the rest of him. I had always had a thing for guys who wore their hair swiped across their forehead. Brynna told me that boys who wore their hair like that were experiencing a slight gender crisis and would more than likely be caught wearing woman’s undergarments someday. Despite that disturbing image forever etched in my mind, I still loved that particular hairstyle.
To put it bluntly, the boy before me was just my type, and I was going to make that fact known.
“My name is Violet. Where do you live?”
“I live about a mile back that way.” He pointed in the direction I had come from.
“I live back that way, too. Maybe we can hang sometime.”
“Maybe we can.” He smiled again, “We’ll trade some more crazy things we’ve heard. I’ll keep you updated on current events. If you’re living up there with the man that runs this, you won’t hear a thing.”
“That man is my father.” 
I blurted it out before I could stop myself. I covered my mouth, thinking I had blown it.
“I know.” He replied, “I saw you with him on the first day. That doesn’t freak me out, but I won’t say that I like him.”
I nodded.
“What’s your name?” I asked, just to break the silence.
“Nicklaus. Well, Nick, for short.”
“Cool. It’s been nice to meet you. Seriously, come find me. I need some people my own age to hang out with.”
“I do, too. We could hang out right now, if you like.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I could help you find this James Maxwell. Who is he, exactly?”
“He’s my sister’s…” 
I tried several different words, including “boyfriend,” “friend,” “acquaintance,” before just settling on “person.” It was so very smooth of me. Thank you, Brynna, for being so complicated that I have to stutter over my words in order to put a status to your relationship with a man. Nick probably thought I was insane.
When I looked up at him, though, he was laughing softly.
“Alright. Let’s go find her person, then.”
***

It was while we were walking through the rows of different campsites that I began to see the discord that would eventually shake the foundation of our lives. When Dad had warned the people that they were to claim their rations by sunrise or else, he had neglected to mention that those who failed to appear would go hungry that day. I couldn’t fathom why he was allowing people to starve, but I knew that in time, the people would grow tired of it, and as we all had seen over the previous years on Earth, when people grew tired of things, absolute chaos ensued.
“Did he mention why he is refusing to give people food?” Nick asked me angrily as we watched a little girl take a huge gulp of water from a bottle the man in the campsite next to hers had handed over.
“No.” I answered vaguely. I knew that I would be asking him later that night.
The answer was clear to me. My father was ruthless, and he knew that by denying these people food, eventually they would begin to die off, and our numbers would thin out. I had overheard him telling one of his minions, as Brynna called them, that we were overpopulated. Enough food hadn’t been packed for every survivor.
“Nature has to take its course, I suppose.” Dad had told him. There was a grimness to his voice that I was unfamiliar with. Though allowing people to starve was a necessity in his opinion, he took no pleasure in seeing them die.
I didn’t relate that to Nick, though, because I knew that by being my father’s daughter, he would begin to see me as being just as cruel. I vowed to change my dad’s mind on the subject. I would make him feed everyone, regardless of whether they showed up on time or not.
Some would argue that what he was doing was the only option. But I didn’t see why we couldn’t all have food for the amount of time it took us to find our own on Pangaea. By the time the rations ran out, we would know what was safe to eat and what wasn’t. However, eating unknown plants would surely yield a few casualties, so that option wasn’t the kindest, either.
Surviving was going to get tougher as the weeks wore on. We were fools, because we had not planned out solutions to any of the more likely, most important challenges.
“Excuse me...” I approached a woman who was kneeling beside her daughter. I pulled my water bottle out of my bag and handed it to her.
“You’re his daughter, aren’t you?” The woman asked with a fury in her voice that scared me. “This is the second day he’s kept our food. We were there on time, too!”
“I’m sorry.” I said uselessly.
“Well, you shouldn’t be. But he should.”
“I know.”
“Thank you for the water.” 
She was abrupt with her gratitude, but I could understand. Her daughter was trembling on the cot, crying softly but making no tears. Dehydration was beginning to take its toll on her small body.
I wanted to loathe him. I wanted to see him through the glare of hatred the same way Brynna did. But I couldn’t discount him. Perhaps if I pleaded with him, he would loosen up on those people. I would make him walk down to the end of the campsite and see the horrors they were beginning to experience. It would take some convincing, but I believed that I could get him to reconsider.
“Naïve.” Brynna’s voice said in my mind. I shook my head slightly to force her cold cynicism from my thoughts.
“Do you know who James Maxwell is?” I asked the woman. She turned to me in irritation, having thought our conversation was over.
“I don’t know if his last name is Maxwell. But a guy named James came through here just this morning. He was tall, muscular, brown hair, goatee and beard, nasty attitude...”
“That would be him.” I said grimly.
“Well, he left.”
“Left?” Nick asked in utter bewilderment, “Left to go where?”
“I don’t know. He took a tent and everything. He took some water and a rations box that he had stolen from someone.”
“He said that he had stolen it?”
I don’t know why that surprised me so much. Our father wouldn’t give him a rations box while he was on his own. The preservation of our supplies was part of the reason why, but the other part was far darker: He wanted James to die slowly for having a relationship, even one that was not physical, with Brynna.
“That’s what he said.” The woman huffed, and I could see that her aggravation was growing. “Anyway, we don’t need thieves in this camp. We don’t need rapists, either, but your father made it clear that he doesn’t care about that. All he cares about is a few people surviving.”
Dad had no set group of people that he wanted to survive. He was just trying to make the numbers dwindle down to a manageable figure. The woman had no idea exactly whose lifespan my father was trying to elongate, she just knew that there was a set group. She was wrong.
“This guy, James, took off into the woods. He’ll die out there, but maybe that’s for the best. How can anyone steal from other people now? I lived in Burma on Earth. I saw people starving everyday. But I rarely saw a man steal. Is this James man close to you?”
“To my sister.” I told her.
“Well, your sister had better think twice about him. What he did was wrong. Something like that shows a man for who he truly is.”
She turned away from me now, and I knew that our conversation was actually finished that time. I looked at Nick, and we turned without a word to head back the way we had come.
My search for James was over. Not only was he a liar who didn’t deserve my sister, but now he was also a thief. He had taken off like a coward to live by himself in the woods.
The woman was right, though I was ashamed to have such a terrible thought. Maybe James dying would be the best outcome for everyone including, if not especially, Brynna.

Brynna

It was night the first time we saw someone that was not of our world. I was pacing in front of the tent as Maura, Elijah, Penny, my father, and Violet slept. Maura was sleeping in my father’s tent at night, and the thought was so sickening that I found myself unable to sleep. The already turbulent, anxious energy was rolling in filthy disgust and pin-sharp betrayal. Even resting quietly was not an option for me anymore.
Violet was keeping something from me. Somehow, she blocked me out of her mind when I tried to decipher exactly what her precious secret was. She did not realize she was doing it, but every time she saw me coming, a wall so large even my strange, new power could not scale it went up inside of her mind.
I still did not know why I could hear peoples’ thoughts. When they passed by me, I could listen in to not only their meandering, ordinary musings but also their fears. They were afraid of starving. They were wary of my father. Both were valid anxieties.
I sat down in front of the fire pit and watched the embers as they died away, as they were replaced by gray, crumbling ashes. I stared at the dying light, thinking of James. Just as the fire burned itself into nonexistence, so did my feelings for him. I had never been clear on exactly what those feelings had meant. They were as hazy to me as other peoples’ innermost thoughts should have been. I had to trust what was sure: He had lied to me. I could not forgive him for that.
Plus, there was a faint whispering in the camp amongst the fearful survivors. People were beginning to embrace the lawlessness of this new land. Innermost desires to cause pain were being worn proudly, emblazoned on the chests of the evil for all of us to see. Selfishness and cruelty were flavors of every day.
I knew, from seeing into someone’s mind, that James was responsible for some of it. Exactly how much remained unclear.
It would only get worse. It would grow in intensity until my father was forced to act. When he did, the consequences were too horrid to picture. The brutality of it would stun everyone into submission. I knew my father was capable of such atrocity even if he did not know it yet.
James.
My mind tormented me by dropping some subtle clue to his continued existence. Sometimes it was just his name appearing like a ghost in the darkness of my thoughts. Sometimes, it was that overwhelming warmth consuming me; it hypnotized me into a daze where I saw only his face.
Looking back now, I know that I was foolish to believe that I could let him go.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea.”
Maura’s first words to me after several days were both insulting and annoying. A cliché? Really? Also, how could she allow herself to assume that I was so devastated over James that I needed her comfort? How could she suggest that I still felt anything for him at all? Did she not know me even after so many years?
I looked up after throwing my cigarette into the embers. The paper burned to a charred black, causing smoke to flow steadily in my direction. I looked up, squinting as my eyes watered. When I gazed out into the darkness, I saw the man standing far off by the trees.
Ours was the camp closest to the forest on that side, so I had the best view. My heart began to bang painfully against my chest as a fear I could not fathom filled me up like scalding hot water. Nausea gripped me; a thousand hands beat against the walls of my chest; the wings of a thousand birds fluttered madly against my stomach, generating the power my anxiety needed to operate with such ruthless efficiency. 
He was wearing black pants and a loose-fitting black long sleeve shirt. Besides his eyes, which I could see even from a distance, he looked just like the rest of us. I could see a faint glow in the blackness of his eyes; it was a light within darkness.
His intentions were unknown. His identity was a mystery. All that could be known in certainty regarding him was that he was not one of us. 
I squinted hard, trying to read into his mind. Instantly, a searing pain shot through my forehead and spread backwards to the base of my scalp. I collapsed to my knees and grasped my head in my hands.
I must have given a cry of pain, because Elijah came running out of the tent.
“What is it? What is it?” He demanded quietly as he held my arms. I looked up to see the man still standing in the same place. He had not moved an inch, but his eyes were rested on me now.
With a shaking hand, I pointed.
“What the…” Elijah whispered. He did not take his eyes off of the strange man as he pulled me to my feet. “Dad!”
As if our father would be brave enough to approach the stranger… I could have laughed.
However, our father proved me wrong when he immediately began to stalk across the grass.
“Danny!” Maura exclaimed behind me, and I scowled at the heavens. 
Truly, I could have turned around and slapped her. Now, she was addressing him by an affectionate nickname. Vomit…
“Keep Violet and Penny back.” 
I had felt them awaken from their sleep and heard their curious thoughts rise quietly to life. They were wondering what exactly was going on.
“Brynna!” Maura called after me, “Elijah!”
Congratulations, you know our names, I thought irritably.
She could have called something else out. She could have at least given us a “Come back!” or something similar.
We were following after my father who was already halfway across the untouched field where the man was standing. I couldn’t help but conjure up images of demons and ghosts appearing to humans. If I had to picture their earthly forms, the man was very close to that image. The way he stared at us unblinkingly as we approached was strange enough as it was. But the pallid color of his skin and the light within his black eyes... They were downright otherworldly.
My heartbeat skipped into high gear when we were right in front of him. His eyes locked with mine the moment I stopped walking. Still, he didn’t blink. I will give myself credit, though, when I say that I did not look away. Perhaps the stare-down was his way of frightening us off of the land. I would not be so easily swayed to move a group of thousands for his sake.
“Are you Pangaean?” My father asked him.
Clearly, he did not inherit any of my mother’s foreign diplomacy skills over the years of their marriage. A simple “Hello, can we help you?” might have started the conversation off a little better.
The man continued to look at me, even as my father glared at him, awaiting an answer. His stare was beginning to unnerve me. I felt as though he had invaded my mind and was listening in on every panicked thought. If I could hear the thoughts of others, could he? I prayed that my mind was closed to him, that he did not have my same ability. I could keep my composure physically but emotionally, I was crumpling. We were living through the subject of several science-fiction movies Elijah and I had watched, ones where hostile aliens killed humans for everything from territorial disputes to farming us for resources to just loathing our race. I could not peg exactly what the man’s motives were for sure, but I knew an attempt to frighten better than anyone.
“What do you want?” My father tried again, and his voice was still infused with boldness despite the growing fear I could hear inside of his mind.
Still, the man did not look away from me. To break the tense staring contest, I spoke next.
“Do you speak English?”
“Brynna, be quiet.” My father snapped at me.
The man’s gaze finally broke free from mine, and I felt as though a tremendous weight had been heaved off of my back. My cognitive functions were chugging along speedily as they always did once again.
“You’re from the green orb. You call it ‘Earth.’” The man spoke perfect English.
“We are.” 
I ignored my father’s burning glare. He wanted to handle the situation himself, but somehow I knew I was more apt to diffuse whatever tension (and there was plenty) that stood firmly between us and this man. 
“What do you call this place?”
“This is Purissimus.” He responded vaguely, but he looked back at me now.
“How can you speak English?” I asked him, though the answer certainly was not important.
“We have studied your race since the Beginning. We knew one day you would come.”
“Our world is gone.” My father chimed in. 
It was as though the man simply could not begin to understand the situation unless he was the one explaining it. I, for one, believed that I was doing a more than satisfactory job of handling that first meeting. But my father had to be the chief, as men so often do. 
“We came here to escape what happened there.” He continued, “We’ll stay out of your way.”
As if I was going to allow that man to just walk away, never to be seen again! The things he could tell us would be far beyond anything we could ever have known otherwise. I didn’t know if he would be up for sharing but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to ask. When I looked at Elijah, behind the fear in his eyes, I saw the same desire to learn all of that vast knowledge the man could provide.
“You destroyed your home. It is gone, because you squandered it.”
He was right about that, so I didn’t argue.
“It’s gone because…” My father trailed off, and I smiled slightly to myself, awaiting his explanation for what had happened. “Either way, we’re here now, and we can’t leave. The ship had enough fuel to make one trip. Even if we had enough to make it back, we would have no home to go to.”
“You expect to keep so many people here on this field?”
My father's aggravation and self-righteousness were rising quickly. He was starting to become offended by the man’s attempts to tell him what to do.
“Do you have a problem with that?” 
“Would you prefer us to move somewhere else?” I asked him.
His voice did not rise in anger, nor did he take his eyes off of my father.
“I would prefer for you to leave. Your kind is not welcome here.”
“Did you not hear what I just said? We have nowhere to go.”
“You destroyed your Earth. You will not destroy what is ours.”
Now, I was panicking again.
“For every day that you stay here, we will take ten from your number. They will not be taken from this realm peacefully. Please be aware of that.”
His skin seemed to glow in the moonlight just as he was beginning to slink back into the darkness of the trees. As the shadow took him, that strange light in his eyes snuffed out, and he truly did resemble a demonic creature from ancient religious literature. His eye sockets were all I could see.
If I wasn’t unnerved before, I was downright terrified now. Still, when I spoke, I did not show any fear. If that is a surprise by this point, then you clearly have not been paying attention.
Elijah looked at my dad for a solution to this very pressing, very dangerous situation. But our father was staring, utterly dumbfounded, at the place where the man had stood only seconds before.
“What are we going to do, Dad?” Elijah demanded as our father turned and stormed back towards our campsite. A long, seemingly endless line of people stood there, gawking and muttering quietly amongst themselves in speculation. It seemed as though every survivor had risen from their slumber. One slight whisper of some strangeness afoot, and they were all awake to witness it.
“Who was he?”
“Is he from here?”
“What does he want?”
Surely, our group suddenly speaking at a volume that rivaled a stadium during the Super Bowl was very disturbing to the natives we now knew existed. One of my father’s cronies came up with his trusty megaphone. They even placed a box down on the ground for him to stand on. After seeing that, I covered my mouth as a small smirk crept onto my lips.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we now know that there are others on Pangaea. They have asked that we refrain from littering and straying too far into the forest.”
I was laughing hysterically now and covering my mouth to hide it. When my father shot me a look of warning, I did not suddenly pretend to be seized by a coughing fit; I merely laughed harder.
He cleared his throat and looked back at the crowd.
“They say that if we do either of those things, there will be consequences. Therefore, anyone that strays too close to the tree-line will be shot.”
I must have looked slightly crazed for a moment as I turned my head to stare at him with eyes widened and all traces of that boisterous humor from a moment earlier gone in a flash. First of all, I had been unaware that guns were on the ship. They were just what we needed on an “uninhabited” planet. Clearly, he had known that Pangaea was populated long before we got there. Secondly, I was shocked at the brutality of his new order. He was already starving people in hopes of lowering our numbers. Now, he was threatening to shoot people if they got too close to the trees? Was being put in front of a firing squad for leaving one's dishes on the ground the next step in his plan?
“You haven’t thought this through.” I told him as he walked behind the ship, flanked by his goons, “He said nothing about littering, for the sake of all deities and Gods!”
“I hate when you say that!” He snapped after turning around to point his finger at me.
“Would you just listen?!” I grabbed his arm, and he shook me off forcefully, almost knocking me to the ground in the process. “This is his planet, and he wants us off. They are threatening us with murder!”
“Do you think I am so stupid that I zoned off during our conversation? I heard him! There is no use repeating it, Brynna Claire. What would you have me do? Do you want to be the one to tell people that we have to get back on the ship, leave here, and fly around until we run out of gas? We have no choice but to stay here. My guards will watch over the campsite. If they come for us, we’ll shoot them.”
“Why did you bring guns to a planet that wasn’t populated?” I challenged him after grabbing his arm again. “You knew they were here! You knew we were invading their planet!”
“We didn’t want anything from them but a place to live. How many times do you think these people have been on Earth? We’ve never told them to leave!”
“We didn’t know they existed!” 
My voice had risen. My tone was betraying my growing trepidation that the situation would soon spiral completely out of control. In fact, I knew it would.
“Of course we didn't know they...
“If they were on Earth, so what?!” I continued furiously, “They did not drop five thousand of their people on us and demand that we let them stay! They know that what happened to Earth was our fault. If it was nuclear, we started the war. If the sun exploded or the ozone layer depleted suddenly, it was because we burned too much fuel or threw our plastic bottles in rivers... I do not know what the environmental implications or the catastrophic consequences of all of that would be! You will have to ask your son! Either way, why would they let us stay here? In enough time, we will do the same thing to this place!”
“So, you believe everything was all our fault? It wasn’t! I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why the earth had to end! But...”
“Yes, you do!” I interrupted him loudly, “You are lying! I will have no parts of this! I am telling everyone everything!”
He grabbed my wrist in a hold so painful that I was forced to wonder very briefly how I would make a splint after he shattered the bone.
“If you say a word, I’ll give you over to him. That’s how they do it in those stories you read, right? To create an alliance, they arrange an exchange of a female? If it’s through marriage or through slavery…”
“I never pegged you as a reader.” I snarled at him through a sardonic grin. “If you want to hit me, and I can see that you do, then do it. But I am taking people who want to go. I am well aware that we cannot leave the planet, but we sure as hell are not staying here.”
When I broke free of him, he reached out to grab me again, but I dodged him. I will admit that I did not expect him to try again. That is the only reason why he was able to succeed in getting a firm hold on me. After pulling me backwards and slamming me against the outer wall of the ship (again), he backhanded me hard across the face. If his hands had not been pinning me to the side of the wall, I would have fallen to the ground, only this time, James would not be there to scoop me up. As my ears rung and my eyes struggled to move back into focus, I heard my father shouting about “remembering who I was talking to” and “watching my (expletive) mouth.”
My head was turned away from him, and his hand was holding my chin. I only smiled slightly as blood dribbled out of my mouth onto the ground; I was thinking over and over again that what he was doing was more of a sign of weakness than of strength. Even as the tears of pain stung my eyes, I thought how humorous it was that he believed himself to be such a man, and yet he could not tolerate my scathing sarcastic nature, my threats to leave the land he ruled so cruelly, or even my demands for common sense.
“We are staying together.” I heard him clearly now, “If you’re not here, then I guess it will be Violet, right?”
I stopped smiling abruptly and looked up at him, livid beyond my wildest dreams. I know now that he saw my eyes turn red. They were redder than they had ever been. I could almost feel them burning.
“If you try anything like that with her, I will rip your heart out!”
I do not know where that violent sentiment came from, but I pictured disemboweling him clearly. I was drunk on the image of ripping his heart from his chest and biting into it. Something was seriously beginning to go wrong in me. Screws were loosening, and some ferocious creature I had no knowledge of before was taking hold.
“What is wrong with your eyes?” He demanded, but through his rage, I could hear the slight tremor in his voice. I had shaken off his hand, but he grabbed my face again to get a better look. The moment he touched my skin, though, he exclaimed in agony and pulled his suddenly reddened hands away. 
“Do not try to stop me.”
“Don’t you understand that there is strength in numbers!?” He yelled after me as I began to walk away. “I will never let you take Penny! You goddamn freak, I will kill you before I let you take her! You won’t take Elijah or Violet, either. Or Maura!”
“Keep her. I don’t want her.” I replied quickly and with an air of blatant arrogance that I am sure only infuriated him more. 
As I walked back around to the front of the ship, I heard him yelling still but did not care enough about what he was saying to listen. Once I was physically out of his presence, I could feel the cold night air on my face again. I could smell the sweet aroma of the white flowers that grew at the sides of the field where there were no tents.
I had returned to normal.
“Pack your stuff.” I told Violet.
“What? Why?!” She jumped up and looked at me with eyes widened in terror, “What happened?!”
“Penny, honey, get your bag.” I called into the tent.
“What are you on about now, Brynna?” Maura demanded, “What is going on?” She saw my face and grimaced. “Sit down. Let me get you some ice. I will talk to him later.”
I chose to answer the first two questions she asked but ignored the second part of what she had said completely.
“We are leaving. Now that you are newly reunited with the love of your life, you will feel no need to join us, I assume. But we will not stay here long enough to experience what is to come.”
“What is to come, dare I ask?” Maura asked as she crossed her arms over her chest, rolled her eyes, and yawned.
“I apologize. It is clear that what that man said is boring you. Please, go back to sleep if you are exhausted. Explaining the severity of the situation to you is slowing me down.” I told her hurriedly.
She chose to ignore my momentary rant.
“Look, I am as stunned by the fact that there are people on this planet as you are. But I am not going to be afraid until I have reason to be.”
“There is reason to be afraid.” Elijah told her bluntly as he stood and watched me throw my own things into my small suitcase. “Brynna, we can’t leave her and Dad here.”
“Really? He knew those people were here. He was just going to make them accept our presence. I do not want any parts of that. I do not want any parts of the massacre, either.”
“Maybe he was bluffing.” Elijah reasoned, “Maybe he was just trying to see if we really needed to be here.”
“I doubt it. What would you do if someone just dropped in on you the way we did to them? You would be angered greatly, would you not? We are getting out of here.”
“But Dad said that if we go into the woods…” Violet started.
“That native man said nothing about the woods. He told us to pack up our things, get back on the ship, and leave. We have no home to go to, as you know very well.”
“I think he was just trying to see if we really needed to be here. Brynna, please…”
“Here.” Maura stuck her hand in between us and dropped an icepack into Elijah's lap. “Make your stubborn sister put some ice on her face.”
She strode away before I could offer a snide retort to that comment. Elijah pressed the icepack to my face, and I cringed before moving away.
“I do not want that. I am perfectly fine.” I snapped at him as I busied my hands with untangling Violet's headphone cords. She had asked Maura to do it earlier but instead, our nanny had decided to take a long, extended walk to the ship with our father.
“Shut up and put this on your face, asshole.”
“I should punch you in the throat for calling me such a vile, unoriginal name.” But I finally did put the icepack on my face. His eyes flashed red, and I reached over to grasp his hand. “Let it go, Eli. He is nothing of concern for us.”
“He is of concern...”
“We are not going to talk about this. We are going to pack our things and go.”
“Let’s just see what happens tomorrow.” He told me, “How dumb will you feel if you take off and nothing happens?”
“I will not be around to find out if I was right or wrong, will I? If you and my father…” I turned my gaze to Maura, because she had suddenly resurfaced behind us, “Want to stay here and get yourselves killed, that is your prerogative, most certainly. But I will not sit by, doing nothing, and let the three of you die.” I looked back at Violet and Elijah. “I will not do it. And no, Violet, it has nothing to do with the fact that I saved your asses once!”
“Stop doing that!” Violet exclaimed, covering her ears and stomping her foot.
“Just to keep you informed, covering your ears does nothing.” I handed her the newly untangled headphones.
“Yay!” All traces of her aggravation at me evaporated suddenly; she smiled widely and walked back to her tent.
“Adolescent mood swings...” I muttered irritably with an eye-roll.
“Brynna, come on,” Elijah led me away from the group, “I sincerely don’t believe that this is anything to be worried about. It makes no sense! If he wanted us off Pangaea that badly, why would he only be taking ten people every day? Why wouldn’t he just come and kill us all right off? I’m sure that they have the means to do it. Plus, we don’t even know if he has any other people with him!”
“Right, this whole planet was created for one man. Aren’t you the more spiritual of the two of us? What Divine point is there in creating a huge mass of livable space for one person?
“I know that you’re being sarcastic right now. But if he wanted to show his real force to really convince us to leave, he would have brought others with him. He would have threatened to kill us all immediately. I don’t think this is serious. Please don’t go running off before you know if this is a real thing or not.”
“I do know, because I just know.” I replied, though I also knew that what I had just said made little sense to him. “If you want to stay here for a day to see the extent of this man’s devotion to his cause, then fine. I will allow it for one day. I cannot guarantee that we will not be one of his first ten. But after tomorrow, I am gone,” I stopped, feeling an unfamiliar lump in my throat as I prepared to finish my thought, “With or without you.”
“Okay. I know that you’re freaked out. But everything is fine. You’ll see. Tomorrow, nothing will happen. This guy is just trying to see how badly we need this place. Otherwise, he’d kill us all right now.”
“If you say so, Elijah…” I replied shortly, “Perhaps he is not killing us outright because he enjoys playing games.”
***

How people could live in such a state of delusion was beyond even my vast understanding of the human condition. I waited throughout the duration of the next day, feeling the storm on the horizon before it literally and figuratively broke over us. There was a rumbling in the suddenly overcast sky; it was a symbol from the heavens that trouble was brewing.
At six PM, Earth-time, lightning began to streak fantastically across the sky. People gazed up, dumfounded at the show of light just above our heads. In brilliant patterns, the lightning struck, leaving black holes in the clouds that quickly filled back over like a scab forming over a gaping wound. A beautifully scented rain descended on us.
People scrambled to get into their tents, but I stood on the moistening ground, staring up.
Alright, heavens. Message received. I thought to myself.
Even Elijah, the realist, was beginning to show signs of worry. Maura was beside herself. In a foolish display of trust in Maura's fragile emotions, my father had relayed all that had been said between us and the man who had come. Now she was clutching Penny in her arms and keeping a firm grasp on Violet's hand.
Others were cloaked in feigned ignorance. However well they hid their growing trepidation, I saw in their minds that they knew something monumentally dangerous was stirring in the cover of those trees. I watched several people stop their meandering activities during the day to stare blankly off into the darkness as they assessed a threat that they could not yet see. No matter, it would present itself before the night was over.
My father was perhaps the only one sure that nothing was going to occur. He pranced around like a show-horse, reminding me of his wife who had behaved with the same irritatingly fake brashness every time an election was near. He spoke to people candidly, explaining away his brutish actions and actually convincing a few of the survivors who were less able to think independently that their safety was his top priority. Those woeful individuals possessed a humanity that could be sold in exchange for their peace of mind. People were going to starve to death, but perhaps their faith in our morally corrupt leader would save them in the end.
Fools. He would trade the lambs that followed closely behind him, the shepherd, because they would go willingly. The ones that fought their slaughter would perhaps meet their ends brutally, but at least they would had fought.
I was neither the obedient nor the fighting lamb, for I was not a lamb at all. I was the wolf hunting the flock. I was looking for the weakest links to sacrifice to the butcher and his comrades that hid in the darkness of the trees. I had no grounds to call anyone on their lack of humanity, because my own was being called into question. My own self-preservation instinct was beginning to supersede my belief that we all needed to pull together. If it came down to either me or one of the faceless survivors being taken, I would willingly devour them in order to escape. I would kill anyone I had to if that was what it took to protect Violet, Penny, Elijah, and myself.
Please note that I took no pleasure in such a depraved selfishness. I expect and will accept punishment from a higher power on the mythical day that I depart this earthly realm, though I feel I have paid my debts in full. Perhaps there is no price high enough for feeling such self-centered ruthlessness.
The darkness of night was upon us. The rain had lessened to a light drizzle.
Alright, you have the cover of darkness. Bring it on, I urged the man silently. I stared at the spot where he had appeared the night before. After blinking once, he was there. But this time, there were others. Nine others, to be exact.
“What is going on?!” A woman behind me exclaimed. She had immediately sensed the imminent danger. There was a menagerie of screams as the natives rushed forward in a blur. A blinding sheet of rain erupted from the clouds and further disoriented us.
“Get to Penny!”
The thought was almost heart-stopping in its urgency. I ran to Maura, yanked Penny from her arms, and looked at Violet for one moment, only to fill her head with the thought to follow. She looked at Maura and then back at me before running in my wake.
I do not know where we were running, but the screams were the soundtrack to our flight. With every last shriek of horror or pain I heard, a new burst of adrenaline forced my legs to move faster. With one arm, I held Penny. With the other, I pulled Violet along. The muck that was rising from the rain-soaked field was making it harder to run as quickly as was necessary. With every step, we faced the risk of becoming lodged in it, immobile and defenseless as the natives hunted us.
“Brynn!” Elijah's voice shouted behind me. I turned to see that he had become stuck. Behind him was a blur of black getting closer at a speed that was impossible for us.
There was not one thought in my mind. The clearness was what spurred me to action. I threw Penny to Violet and ran the length of the distance between us and him. I knew that my momentum rivaled that of the man in pursuit of Elijah, because I was the one who would reach Elijah first. However, the enemy was not far behind, and he would have reached Elijah just a second after I did.
Something had come over me that day in my apartment when we had faced those Reapers. A new, violent beast consumed my human self. Though I had neither claws nor fangs nor the fighting instinct of a cornered animal, I had behaved like I did. My new ability to destroy a threat on Earth was nothing compared to what suddenly overtook me there in that field on Pangaea. I took one huge leap over Elijah and tackled the man running towards us. While still in midair, I sunk my teeth down into his neck and spun around quickly so that I was behind him, latched onto his back. He fell to the ground and landed face-down in the mud.
Elijah would tell me later that my eyes had turned white, and even from a few feet away, he could see that my pupils had elongated vertically to resemble the eyes of a snake or a cat, he was not sure. He reminded me of something I had already known whilst in the heat of that fight with the native; I was suddenly gifted with sharp, pointed fangs that allowed me to rip into the man's skin wherever I could do the most damage.
What he could not tell me was what he could not possibly know, unless he was reading my mind the way I could read his. As the man flipped over and landed gracefully on his hands and feet before standing up to charge me, my mind remained blank except for one basic thought. It was the last, most vital instinct of them all: Protect.
When he had flipped, he had sent me hurtling through the air to land painlessly on my back. I pushed myself up with a strength I had never before exhibited and charged right at him. Though he was clearly used to such power and skill, I was the one who took him down. I pinned his arms to the ground and slammed my head down into his, drawing in raspy, hissing breaths.
Elijah would tell me that I made an odd noise resembling a roar that I was attempting to stifle.
“It was so freaking awesome!” He would rave later, though I will admit, that the fourth word in his thrilled exclamation has been revised in order to cater to my profane hatred of profanity.
The man tried to free his arms, but my grip on him was tight enough to shatter his wrists. His fight to throw me off enraged me even further, and I slammed my head down into his again, only this time with even more brutal force. Whoever said that one cannot win with a head-butt was wrong. Though I will admit that I felt a slight sting, my mind remained clear. I was still able to fight with reckless and violent efficiency.
“Don't kill him!” Violet exclaimed, and I looked up just as I went to sink my teeth down into the pulsing vein of the stranger's throat. I would not drink his blood. I would simply kill him. I would kill him so that he was no longer a threat.
“Listen to your sister.” My father's voice said behind me. Though I was not looking, several others were with him, approaching us from behind. Half the campsite was coming to witness the strange event. “Don't kill him. We need him.”
Just because my father told me not to, I inched down closer to the man's throat, feeling an overpowering urge to rip into his skin. I couldn't deny it. I needed to kill him. He had been after Elijah. He was a threat to him. I needed to ensure my brother's safety by ending that man's life.
But Violet had been the first to order me not to kill him. In fact, it had barely been an order. It was more of an imploring plea. I looked up at her, the rain casting a moving gray sheet between us. Still, I could see her clearly. What was happening to me frightened her, and to see me kill another living being, human or not, would only worsen her new fear. So, I released the man's arms, jumped up and ran my fingers through my mud and rain-drenched hair, all the while loathing the fact that I had to turn my target over to my father when I so desperately needed to dispatch him violently from this world myself.  
Of course, I knew letting go of him was the worst thing I could do, and I was right, as usual; he jumped up and turned to run. I could not be sure whether he was attempting to get away, or if he was going after Elijah again. For my brother's sake, I had to believe the latter. Without even turning around, I swung my fist back and hit the man hard in the face; the force sent him hurtling backwards to land sprawled out on his back.
Several of the men in our camp grabbed hold of him. I watched in slight amusement as ten of them hauled him off. It took ten fully grown men to subdue one. It was as a small smile pulled at my lips that I noticed the remaining spectators spectating me. Some looked downright horrified by my very existence. Others were bemused. Others thought I was easily the coolest thing on Pangaea. Others were expressionless, though their screaming minds betrayed their fear and curiosity.
My father was the only one whose mind shouted the livid thoughts of a confused and betrayed man. He felt that I had lied to him, though why he expected honesty after so many years of hatred between us, I was not sure. He felt that I had kept a dangerous secret from him, though he could not determine the exact nature of what it was that I had been hiding. I was one of them, he believed. I had always been one of them. But no, he had seen my birth. He knew that I was human.
The last word through his mind was one even he tried to push away:
Infected.
The alarm I felt at hearing that word spoken, even in his thoughts, was so sudden that it stole my breath away. I was not afraid of how he would handle my “infection,” though I should have been. I was more worried about being thought of as dangerously ill in the first place.
Elijah stood up, grasped my hand, and pulled me away from the gawking, silent crowd. The rain had ceased suddenly, so my brother, sisters, and I walked to the edge of the campsite that had been abandoned in the fight.
“Penny, did you see anything?” I asked her softly. They were odd words to speak after such a brutal occurrence but truly, Penny emerging without any scars, physical or emotional, was my chief concern.
Penny shook her head and reached her arms out to me. I felt that she was trembling with cold and potent fear. I knew that I could remedy both. I stood up with her as she clung to me with every last bit of her young strength. I reached into a tent and pulled out a blanket; I would repay the owner with my own later. After prying Penny from me in order to wrap her up, I swaddled her like a baby, even going so far as to tuck her arms inside the confines of the blanket. Then, I cradled her close to my chest, feeling my eyes dissolve back into their normal blue as they met her wide, fearful eyes.
Her fear was not of me, God bless her. Her fear was of what had just happened. Her fear was of the natives.
I shushed her when she started to cry softly. I rested my cheek against her forehead and rocked her back and forth, back and forth. My only thought was to warm and calm her. Though my muscles were beginning to ache and an angry cut on my forehead was dripping blood into my left eye, I thought of nothing but my sweet little sister.
It was strange, how I could switch from feeling nothing but a need to kill a living creature to a need to comfort one I held so very dearly to me.
I was thinking only of tranquility as I held her, believing wholeheartedly that I could soothe her not just with my words and my arms around her but also with calming thoughts. I was so lost in them that I was beginning to believe that such peace was actually possible. Even after I lulled her to sleep, I stayed drunk on that fabled serenity. I did not reemerge from its depths until I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I opened my eyes.
Penny was still nestled against my chest, fast asleep. I turned to look, expecting to see Elijah or Violet standing there. Instead, I saw my father standing with his burly minions behind him. Instead, I saw the butt of a shotgun being pulled back.
The last thing I heard was Penny screaming.
***

The highlights of the previous day played on in my mind like a grimly educational slide-show in a class on the meaning of things. I saw James's handsome face. I felt that striking warmth that absorbed me every time he had kissed me. As a quick, crippling terror exploded inside of me at the sight of the earth burning, I clung to that warmth of him in order to be comforted. Then, the warmth fell to a frigidity that was my need to feel nothing when it came to James. He had lied to me. He had walked away. He was gone forever. Violet's secret was that James had left the campsite. Despite knowing most things, I could not see his path clearly. I could not see him scarcely at all. But I did not want to see him. I wanted no parts of James Maxwell.
James Maxwell. James Maxwell.
His voice saying his name when he introduced himself to me deepened whatever spell I had fallen under.
I was repeating his first name as I emerged from the depths of that spell.
“I must be just as stupid as you think I am. I thought that you had let him go. I thought you had been able to reason away whatever ridiculous, immature feelings you had for him.”
It was my father talking. I opened my eyes to find that I was in a room lit only by one dim bulb hanging next to the iron door. He was sitting in front of me, tapping my pack of cigarettes on the table. Actually, it was not the pack that I had left in my tent. The one in his hands was unopened.
“Yeah.” He replied as he held the pack up for me to see. “We knew people would have a fit if they had to quit smoking, so we brought a few hundred packs. Though, when we run out, you'll have no choice but to quit. I brought these specifically for you, Brynna. I know they're your brand. I thought it was the least I could do.”
“The least you could have done was not hit me in the face, actually.” I replied after lifting my head delicately. “But you have already done that three times since we got here. Just like old times, is it not?”
He chuckled softly and slid the pack towards me. When in doubt, smoke a cigarette. That had always been my motto and mantra. But when I reached for the pack on the table, I found that my hands were cuffed tightly behind the chair in which I was sitting. A jolt of panic went through me that I prayed had not flashed through my eyes. The only way to trump him was to show no weakness.
“It appeared as though you hadn't realized that you were handcuffed, and I just wanted to make sure you were aware. That's only responsible.”
“Are you going to kill me, Dad?”
There was not even a slight tremor to my voice. I was not afraid of him. I did not call him “Dad” to soften him into sympathizing with me. I used the term in sarcasm and disdain to the shock of no one, including him.
“I don't know, Brynna. I talked with several people. You never would have been able to do that. Most of them are just so stupid.” He stood up and started to pace around the room, “They're afraid of you. They don't want you in the camp anymore. After seeing what they saw you do, they think you're one of them. One of the natives, I mean. You'll probably be surprised by this, but I did try to reason with all of them. I tried to tell them that you are my daughter, and I know that you're not one of them. I don't know what's come over you, but I know you're not a native.”
“This conversation is fascinating. Really, it is. But let me stop you right there. If they don't want me in the camp, then I'll pack my things and leave. I am not afraid of the natives. I can live in the woods.”
“That was originally going to be my first course of action. Banishment, exile, whatever you want to call it.” He told me after sitting back down again.
“Quarantine.” I added breezily in a play on his earlier theory regarding infection that I had so rudely heard while invading his mind. He ignored me.
“But then, I realized that I could use you. Did you notice how...” He looked up, searching for the right word. I read into his mind to root out what exactly it was he was trying to say. I wanted the little powwow to be over as soon as possible. The sooner I was able to start my attempt at surviving independently, the better. I wanted to know immediately how apt I was to make my own way.
“Did I notice how entranced the man was with me?”
“Well, did you?”
“I would not call it entrancement. I would not call it anything, because it did not exist. You are wrong.”
I knew that he was right.
“I'm not, though. We talked to the man that you attacked. He says that you're changing over. He says it's happening to a lot of us. Not all, just some. Special, is what he called you. Freaks, is what I call you.”
“You would.” I nodded and smiled in quiet triumph. He was afraid of me, of us, whoever or whatever we were.
“Now, the reason why I bring up the man from the first night is because he's their leader. There are so many of them, Brynna. There are too many. They'll overpower us. Do you remember what I said that day behind the ship? About trading you?”
“Sure do.”
My heart was beginning to hammer roughly against its cage of bone. He could hear it. He could feel my tension rising. I would not show it outwardly to him. I would never allow him to see such weakness when I knew of the sadistic delight it would bring him.
“Well, I must have had a freakish moment of my own, because I predicted that would be what he wanted. He wants you.”
I panicked internally. I had felt hunted before. I had felt preyed upon in my youth, though certainly not by my father. His best friend, my godfather... He had been so very bad. He was Maura's husband, too, I remembered... She had covered her ears when he dragged me downstairs...
Now I was going to face the same awful horror. I was going to be the prey again, this time to a man whose origin I did not even know.
My father saw the fear in my eyes. I did not look at him, but his thoughts betrayed an equal mix of satisfaction, justification, and surprisingly, regret. The three contrasts rolled together in a fight to the death. Regret won, a victory that stunned me into silence and enraptured attention.
“Brynna, I should have been able to love you.” He said as he stared intently at me, “We both should have. But after what happened, after what it did to you...” He trailed off and looked away, “It turned you into such an awful person. At first, we both felt sorry for you. How could we not? Then your brother...”
“I know that you hate me for what happened to Lucien.” I told him dryly. My eyes might have shown the sudden grip of sadness that had taken me, but my voice certainly would not.
I did know that they all hated me for that. But I hated myself for it, too. I allowed their loathing to contaminate me, though a small, sensible part of my inner self understood that my little brother's death had not been my fault.
I cannot speak about these things easily. I can barely put them into words. Still today, I feel great pain over them, despite living for years under the assumption that I could no longer feel or show strong emotional strife internally or externally, respectively.
“Your mother... She was broken after that. And I didn't care about what had happened to you anymore. I'll admit that to you. Neither did she. You were supposed to be watching him. I don't care what happened. You were old enough to know that you had to pay close attention to him or else an accident could happen. Your mother, Maura, and I explained that to you time and time again. I don't care how traumatized you were. You shouldn't have looked away.”
I was not going to make excuses. I was not going to pass the blame.
To this day, I still do not know how long he floated face-down in the water before I came out of my stupor.
I could not breathe when that thought crossed my mind. It always crept up on me like a knife-wielding thief in the night. It always gutted me and bled me dry.
“I couldn't love you after that. I tried. She did, too. But...” He leaned forward, his eyes begging me to understand, to see things as he saw them, which in his opinion, was the only way, “We wanted it to be you, not him. That's terrible to say, I know. I’m almost sorry that I’m saying it to you right now, that your mother and I said it so many times. A small part of me is sorry for saying such a horrible thing. But we're being honest now, aren't we?”
“I have always known that.” I stared at him as he struggled with that “new,” honest revelation. They had said things like that before. But through their actions even more than their words, I became aware that I was not wanted anymore. They stopped buying me Christmas presents. They stopped celebrating my birthday. My father started to lose his temper, striking me when he found himself too angry to use words. My mother pretended I did not exist, even going so far as to throw my baby book away. At the time that the world ended, it had been thirteen years since the event that had taken my innocence. It had been twelve and a half since my brother's passing. In that time, she had spoken perhaps four words to me, and even that is a generous figure. I was well aware of their hatred and resentment.
I accepted it. I could understand it. My moment of weakness had killed my brother. The moment I allowed myself to lapse into a fit of silence and ignorance to escape my raging, terrified thoughts, my little brother had slipped and fell, hitting his head on the side of our pool.
I cannot imagine him drowning. My heart splits a little every time I see it, even today, over sixty years later.
I had been so weak. I had been so irresponsible. That was why my brother had died.
I had been too trusting. I had been too naïve. That was why my godfather was able to do what he did.
I had tried to apologize, only to find that my words were as useless as the many baskets of fruit and flowers my parents' friends had sent the week after Lucien had died. I sat at the table, zoning off into a tormenting space of guilt, regret, disgust, fear, and loathing, staring at the fruit as it rotted and the flowers as they wilted away.
I expected Maura to apologize, too. I expected her to be on my side. What a little fool I was... She felt no anger over what her husband had done to me. She felt no pity for me. She felt only rage at what had happened to Lucien. She felt only that I had seduced her husband.
That I could not understand. I had been nine.
None of this is meant to make you see me positively. After all these years, I could not care less. Their faces fade from my mind with each day of my eternal life. I cannot remember my mother's face at all. It was blocked out, erased completely from the portrait I had of her in my mind. Elijah, Violet, and even Penny report the same blank spot in their memories where her face once blossomed in comforting familiarity. Perhaps I inadvertently erased her in my mind and theirs, though this has caused more pain than it has remedied. My father's face has begun to drip, like when rain falls on a painted canvas. Maura's is clearest to me, but then, I had been seeing it since the day I was born. It is branded into my memory quite painfully.
I have faith that one day, it will fade away, too.
All of those thoughts in that moment with my father were the direct result of the fact that I had fallen into the same kind of stupor that had indirectly claimed my brother's life. My father's shouting voice, his hands around my throat, the way he shook me... Those were my jolts back to reality.
“This is what it was! This is what killed him! You bitch! It should have been you!”
Seeing for the first time in thirteen years the exact state I had been in while his youngest child was struggling for life was enough to tip him over the edge. He slapped me, backhanded me, slapped me, backhanded me. I refused to cry out, but I did spit my blood at him once enough had filled my mouth.
“STOP IT!”
Maura's desperate scream, barely powerful enough to break through her sobs...
What in the world made her think that I needed her to save me?
“Go! Get out!” She found whatever small amount of strength she had in her to pull him away from me and push him towards the door.
“Don't you coddle her, Maura. If you do, we're done.” My father told her breathlessly before storming out of the room.
Being knocked around so forcefully must have severely boggled my mind, because I swore that I could hear him sniffling and gasping as he walked up the hallway. But surely, he would not cry over what he had said or done to me. If he was crying, which he probably was not, it was more than likely because he had been talking about Lucien, whom he loved more than the rest of us combined.
“Don't coddle me, Maura.” I said, loudly enough so he could hear, “If you do, you lose such a swell man.”
Even in such agony, and through a swelling mouth, I could still find my inherent sarcasm. I would not succumb to vulnerability now.
“Darling... my darling...” 
Tears were running down her cheeks as she came around to my side of the table. She knelt in front of me, put her hands on my face, and pulled me forward to kiss my forehead.
I shook her off furiously. If my hands had been free, I would have slapped her. What made her think that I needed her? She had been kind to me in random spurts throughout the previous thirteen years. When she wasn't being kind, she was ignoring me. It took several alcoholic beverages coursing through her system for her to find the courage to be out-and-out cruel.
“I'll help you, sweetheart. I will convince him that this is ridiculous. You're just sick. We'll find a way to make you better.”
For the first time, I realized that I did not want to be better. If the new being that now dwelt inside of me was an illness, then I did not want to be cured. Part of that sudden acceptance was a realization that there was no stopping the change. But the larger part was a thrilled acknowledgment of the fact that Maura, my father, and so many others had not been “chosen,” we'll say, and as a result, were terrified of me. To put it in blunt, perhaps misleading words, I was suddenly gifted with a tremendous manipulative power, not just an enhanced physical strength.
“I'll make my own way from now on, thank you so much.” I replied as a grin spread across my puffy lips. “I am used to doing just that, and you know how I hate change.”
“I love you, Brynna.” She kissed my forehead again before pulling away to look at me. “I know things have been difficult, but I love you, and I'm sorry. I can make it up to you right now. I can make things right. I'll talk to him. I'm so sorry, Brynna!”
As another fit of tears took her, she threw her shaking arms around my neck. I grimaced in disgust, fearing briefly that the awkwardness I felt at being in the same room with such an emotional wreck would kill me. Secondhand embarrassment always took hold of me when others allowed themselves to exhibit hysterical outpourings of emotion. That secondhand embarrassment was genuinely painful.
I knew things that were impossible to know. Still, I did not know if she was genuinely remorseful, or if that was merely another moment of random, untrustworthy affection. Her mind yielded no clear answer. After she pulled away from me, I turned the blood over in my mouth, narrowing my eyes as I studied her appearance for some hint of her true motive.
“Just let me help you, sweetheart. Let me talk to him for you.”
I turned my head and spit the blood onto the concrete floor.
“I do not need your help.” I told her bluntly. “I do not want it, either. I would very much appreciate it if you would just leave the room. I ask for the kindness of your abandonment. That is all.”
“Please don't do that. Please don't start with that. You only do that when you're pushing someone away. Please don't push me away, Brynna.”
Now that rage that made shocking, sudden appearances blasted towards her in a delightfully terrifying display.
“You think you can push me away for years and that I should not be allowed to do the same to you!?” I bellowed as I lunged towards her. Even though I was handcuffed securely to the chair, she still jumped back. She had not been expecting the sudden change in my temperament. 
“I do not want or need your help! I have never forgiven you! I have never forgotten what you allowed your husband to do to me!”
Her role in what Michael had done to me had never been addressed openly, at least not by me. My words broke her. She buried her face in her hands, whispering something that even my newly heightened sense of hearing could not decipher.
“Speak up, Maura, or I will just read your mind!” I ordered in a furious whisper.
Blood was dribbling out of my mouth, and my cheek was swollen on one side. She pulled her hands away from her face, reached up, and tried to wipe the blood away, but I shook her off, lunging forward again, needing so desperately to hit her. She cried into her hands for another annoyingly over-emotional moment.
“I said that I was afraid!” She whispered tremulously, “I said that I'm sorry, but I was so afraid of him...”
I laughed somewhat maniacally, I'll admit.
“I didn't help you then, but I can help you now, Brynna.” She implored me softly before reaching out to touch my face again.
“Stop trying to touch me!”
For a long moment, she stared at me, awaiting an answer that I refused to give to a question that I barely realized she had posed. What she wanted from me was a chance to make up for her cowardice and ignorance, both of which had allowed her husband to claim my innocence. I would never allow her to achieve that peace of mind so easily. I would never allow her to believe that all was forgiven. In fact, I firmly believed that what had occurred would never be completely erased between us.
After that long, dreadful silence that stirred her very soul, she turned to leave the room.
“Maura...” My voice was back to its normal volume. She turned back to me, a look of pathetically desperate hope in her eyes.
I spat my blood at her. She covered her face, and the wad of blood and saliva splashed onto the backs of her hands before dripping down her arms. It was gloriously disgusting, I will admit.
“That is for covering your damn ears. Now, get out.”

Quinn

The story of Brynna Olivier was twisted and contorted in a fashion that would rival the abilities of the press at home. Although, I sincerely doubted that even the most ridiculous of tabloids would believe that she was a Pangaean spy placed on Earth to gather our secrets.
“It's ridiculous, Quinn! He's her father!” Alice told me in a rage that I couldn't quite match, “Do you know what I heard today?”
She didn't wait for me to ask what it was exactly that she had heard.
“I heard that he's going to turn her over to the natives as a peace offering. His own daughter!”
“Maybe it's just a rumor. I doubt anyone could do something like that to their own kid.”
By instinct, though, I knew that I was mistaken. If it meant that he and the people he wanted to survive would see many days, he would sell his entire family. I knew that Daniel Olivier was that evil, but I didn't want to scare Alice by relaying that belief to her.
“It isn't a rumor! We can't sit by and let that happen!”
“Whoa...” I held up my hands to stop her from continuing. “We can't get involved in this. The last thing we need is to get exiled and be on our own.”
“We are on our own! He's starving people! Who is to say that tomorrow it's not our food that he's keeping!?”
“You are really upset about this.”
“And you're not? You're not upset that this man has pretty much appointed himself our leader and that he's cruel and evil? He's letting people die, Quinn, after we fought like hell to get here and live! She's not like him. She walked out of the ship first. She's brave.”
“That doesn't mean that she's not like him. It just means that she's brave. We don't know anything else about her besides that.”
“You're just saying all of this to make me change my mind about helping her. I know that you believe the same thing I believe. After last night...” Alice's voice was trembling now as the memory of the attack on us took over her. “I was right there when she attacked that guy. You should have seen the way she took him down.” She laughed slightly as she remembered it. “It was amazing. He was after her brother. I would pray for whatever came over her to come over me if it was you that was about to get eaten. They ripped people apart, Quinn. One of their people, a woman...” She grimaced slightly, “She ripped into this guy, and there was so much blood...”
“Hey...” I stood up and embraced her, “Let's not think about this right now.”
“They're going to come back. Someone at the top let it slip that they're going to take ten of us every night until we leave. We have nowhere to go, so they'll just keep coming back until there's no one left. They'll kill us all.”
“So, what do you think we should do?”
“I told you what I think we should do. We need to help Brynna! Don't ask me how I know that's what we're supposed to do. I just know. The same thing came over us when that thing broke into the house. We could see in the dark, we could communicate without words. Don't you see? We're mutating!”
“Mutating?” I asked her, as though the word had been spoken in a language I had never learned.
“I've told you this before. Our bodies are doing what they need to do in order for us to survive. We're getting faster, stronger, and smarter. We're learning to fight off threats, almost like how animals do. That's my theory, anyway. I think it's pretty reasonable.”
“It is reasonable.” I sat down on my sleeping bag, pondering what she had just said only to realize that it made absolutely perfect sense. “That would explain everything!”
“It has a magical element to it, though, doesn't it?” She sat down next to me. “It's not completely biological.” She paused and looked thoughtful for a minute, “There's something miraculous about it. It's not just science, you know?”
“I guess.”
“Daniel Olivier is afraid of her. He's not mutating the way that some of us are. We'll be next, once he realizes it's happening to more than just her. You know, I've heard his other kids are doing it, too.”
“Yeah, I heard someone saying that the other day. So, what is he going to do? Hand them all over to the leader of the natives?”
“I know he will. He thinks they're sick. He thinks they're infected with something. But you and I both know from what happened to us while we were still on Earth that it's not a sickness. It's a response to a threat, right?”
“Yes.”
“Quinn, I know this is what we're supposed to do. We have to get her out. We have to help her escape. It has a significance to it that I don't really understand yet. But then, maybe I'm not supposed to understand right now. Maybe we're just supposed to take a leap of faith.”
There was that word again: Faith. It was still a challenging idea for me, even after everything we had overcome since that psychic dream. However little I believed in the divine significance of our escape and continued survival, I did believe in Alice. I also knew that wherever she went, I was going to follow. So if she believed that we needed to save Brynna, then we were going to do it. We were going to fight together, for better or worse.
“Alright,” I nodded and looked up at her, “Do you have a plan?”
“I have the beginning of a plan. We need to get her brother alone. He's the closest to her, from what I've seen. So he'll be the one that will want to help her.”
“How are we going to get him alone?”
“We live in tents, Quinn,” She laughed, “Breaking and entering isn't exactly difficult, is it?”
***

It was three hours until nightfall. Thus, it was three hours until the natives returned for their dinner. We had three hours to escape the campsite. Suddenly, the two-day rush to the launch site didn't seem as time-sensitive as it had in the moment.
Alice led the way over to Elijah Olivier's tent. The woman with the dark red hair who had accompanied them was sitting behind it, her face in her hands, sobbing. Somehow, I knew not to sympathize with her.
I gripped the zipper of the tent in a shaking hand and began to pull it delicately. Inside, there was only silence. For all we knew, he wasn't even there. Perhaps that was for the best; we would sneak in, close the tent, and signal for him to be quiet when he returned. Then, we would explain to him what we were trying to do as quietly as possible.
When the tent was opened enough that I could see in, I saw that Elijah was inside and looking right at us. Like idiots, we ducked from his view, but by then it was too late. He ripped the zipper down and pulled us both inside with a strength and rage that stunned us both into terrified silence.
“What do you want?” He hissed at us with a fistful of our shirts clenched tightly in his fists.
“Calm down, man,” I whispered as I held up my hands in surrender, “We want to help your sister!”
He released us and turned back to whatever it was that he had been silently working on. Alice and I looked at each other in horror when he pulled out a gun and began loading it with bullets. We were not worried that he would shoot us. We were worried that he would shoot his way through anyone that stood in the way of the path to his sister. A massacre of his father's people would not spell peace for the rest of us. We would all suffer for it.
“Listen to me,” Alice reached out to grasp his wrist, but he shook her off, “Elijah? That's your name, isn't it?”
“That's me. Elijah Olivier. That name is becoming quite the stigma around here, isn't it?”
“It is,” I replied honestly, and Alice cast me a scathing look, “Sorry.”
“Don't apologize. I'm not deaf. I hear what people are saying. They're right, though. That's the sad thing.”
“You can't do anything completely insane, okay?” Alice reasoned quietly, “Going in there all guns blazing is completely insane!”
“Well, he wants to sell my sister off to those freaks that came in here and killed ten of us. I'll kill every last one of them before that happens. I'll kill my own dad before I let him hand her over to that guy, whoever the hell he is.”
Alice looked like she wanted to argue his point, but instead, she forged ahead with detailing our plan.
“You're going to need help. We're going to help you break in. I had another dream last night. She's at the bottom of the ship. I saw the number three. Does that mean anything to you?”
“There are storage compartments down there that are numbered. I don't need you two to go with me. You've just helped me more than I could ever thank you enough for.”
He loaded the clip into the gun quietly.
“Have you ever even shot a gun?” Alice demanded crossly.
“Nope. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. Point and pull the trigger, right?”
I jumped in to aid Alice’s quest of calming him down.
“You're angry. You have every right to be. But if you get yourself killed, you're doing her no good. Do you think he'll tell them not to kill you? If you go in there, shooting the place up, do you think he'll tell them to bring you in alive?”
“I don't care what he does to me.”
“If you get yourself killed, you won't be able to save her!” Alice whispered in frantic irritation. “We'll go with you. We'll help you fight them off.”
“Are you telling me that you two can fight the same way she did the other day?”
“We can.” Alice answered, “There was this thing on earth. It was sitting outside of our window at night. And when I let it into the house, it tried to kill us. We fought it off. I shot it and killed it. It was my...” She stopped, closing her eyes for a minute to steady herself, “Let's just say that we both know what it is to lose someone. We also know that there's nothing wrong with Brynna. She doesn't deserve to be handed over to them. Whatever it is that’s happening isn’t just happening to her.”
“I know that, because it's happening to me.” Elijah looked up at us, his eyes burning, “My first plan was to show him how my eyes turn red every time I look at his face. Then, I can only hope that I would have grown fangs and been able to take him out the way Brynna took down the native that was after me.”
“What he's done to her and to everyone else is awful. But he's still your dad, Elijah.” Alice tried to reason with him, “If he is meant to die, it shouldn't be you killing him.”
His expression darkened as he looked up at her.
“If he's looking to hurt my sister, then it's my job to kill him.”
“We aren't going to kill anybody,” I chimed in again, “We're going to go fight some people, and we'll win, because they're not changing over the way we are. We're going to get her out of there before the natives come back tonight. We're going to leave camp. It's not safe here anymore.”
“Is there anywhere that's safe?” Elijah stared into the lantern that was burning away in the corner of his tent. “It doesn't matter. Anywhere is better than here. Brynna and I won't leave my sisters. My sisters won't let us leave Maura behind.”
“Is Maura that woman outside?” I asked. My tone displayed my distaste for her. I had never spoken a word to her but still, I didn't like her. More importantly, I didn't want to be responsible for her.
“Yeah. I don't trust her anymore.” He put the gun in his back pocket, “I was considering joining the Marines for a while. Doesn't every kid dream about that?”
“I know I did.” 
I smiled slightly despite the situation. I didn't quite see how his aspirations to join the military had anything to do with the situation. But the memory of being a little boy and pretending trees were helicopters that I was jumping out of and play-fighting with my dad like we were in combat brought a flicker of joy to me that I hadn't been expecting.
They were memories I had long since forgotten.
“This is kind of like that. Like a bad-ass mission, you know? Breaking in, fighting through people, rescuing someone. God, if she heard me say, 'rescue…' Brynna doesn't need to be rescued. She's never needed me to protect her, but she has always let me think that she does.” I watched as tears rushed into his eyes. He assumed we weren't paying enough attention to see him swipe them away. “I'm not rescuing her now, either. I'm helping her save herself. She wouldn't have it any other way.” He cleared his throat and looked at us. “Before we do this, what are you names?”
We told him.
“Alright, Quinn and Alice. I don't know why you're so ready to do this with me. But you said you know that it's what you're supposed to do. I understand that, and I'm not going to question it.”
“Good, because we're running out of time.” Alice told him as we crawled out of his tent. “There's no time for questioning anything. Let's do this.”
They walked ahead of me, and I stood staring after her with my mouth agape. If any of the three of us was like a Marine, it was Alice. She was charging ahead, mission in mind, with courage swelling in her chest. Elijah was connected emotionally to the task, but Alice saw it through the clear eye of a soldier.
I followed after them, grinning despite my nerves beginning to respond to the situation. Her bravery inspired a great admiration in me. Our love was maturing from that of an adolescent romance to something real, something much deeper. Ever since we had landed on Pangaea, our bond had been stronger, feeling at times to be completely unbreakable.
I hoped someday she could see me with that same admiration. Once both of us reached that level, then I would know what I had always suspected: we were supposed to be together forever.
She hung back to grasp my hand. We walked along, smiling at each other as though we were simply taking an early evening stroll. Then she stood on her tiptoes, kissed my cheek, and whispered:
“You're the bravest guy I know. Don't forget it.”
Faith. It was a different kind than what we had discussed earlier, but it felt no less divine.
***

We stood, peering around the end of the ship as the first signs of night began to descend. A silence came over the forest that the three of us knew preceded the arrival of the natives.
“I told my other sister that if they come while I'm in here, they need to run into the woods. We'll have to look for them. But we'll find them. If anything should happen to me, they'll find James. I don't know if I can trust the guy, but I know that he's better than my father.”
Alice and I both knew that he wasn't telling us that to supply us with the information. He was reminding himself. Through that reminder, he was reassured that even in the event of his delay or his death, his sisters would be taken care of. I had seen his younger sister Violet many times. She appeared to be only a year or so younger than us, but there was a selfless quality to her that neither Alice nor I had acquired yet.
I watched her hand over a bottle of water to a child dying of thirst. She hadn't known whether her father would give her more to drink, but she had known Brynna would sacrifice her own. I was becoming fascinated with their family. I was fascinated by their quiet kindness. How Daniel Olivier's children could turn out so good when he was anything but baffled me.
“How are we going to get past the guards?” Alice whispered as she craned her neck to see how many were standing by the folded down stairs that led onto the ship.
“Why are there guards in the first place?” I asked, “Do they think someone is going to try to break her out?”
“No,” Elijah replied, “They think the natives are going to try to blow up the ship.”
“But if they want us to leave, then why would they blow up the ship?” I asked.
“Because if they can't get us to leave, then they can blow up our supplies so we won't be able to survive for very long.” Elijah answered in a voice devoid of emotion. “I can't shoot them without people hearing.”
“Wait here.” Alice told us.
“Allie!” I called after her in a loud whisper as she approached the guards.
“Hi!” She called out. She waved cheerfully, and I could hear her smiling, “Hey, I think someone robbed my tent. It's so funny, though. They only took my pads.”
Oh, Lord...
“Your what?” The man asked in slight horror. Typical male response to a woman bringing up that awful thing that happened to them once a month... I would have stammered out a response, too.
“My pads. Like... for my end-of-the-sentence,” Alice laughed in fake embarrassment, “I'm really going to be needing them, though. I was wondering if I could go into the storeroom and get another pack.”
“No civilians are allowed in the storeroom, sweetheart. I'm sorry.”
“Then can you go get them? It's kind of an emergency. The flood gates are opening, if you will...”
To watch those guards squirm in discomfort was more than amusing. It was downright hilarious. I was cracking up and struggling not to clap my hands in triumphant glee. Even Elijah was grinning as he watched.
“Go get them, man.” Another guard told the one Alice was addressing.
“Kids share way too many details these days...” He muttered as he walked up the high metal staircase to the door of the ship and scanned his key card.
Once it was open, Alice's falsely sunny demeanor vanished. If I wasn't in awe of her before, I definitely was when I saw her switch into Tomb Raider mode. She grabbed hold of the first guard and threw him against the hard, metal exterior of the ship. With one hand she held him firmly to the wall, and with the other, she grasped a handful of his hair. As Elijah and I watched with our mouths hanging open, she banged his head into the side of the ship twice with only enough force to knock him unconscious.
The two remaining guards had stood completely dumbfounded at her sudden changeover and at the unbelievable strength that a girl half their size possessed. But after that initial shock wore off, they sprung into defensive mode. The one on the ground grabbed her from behind and held her arms to her sides. She jerked her body forward and flipped him off of her back before jumping down onto him and hissing in his face.
Elijah and I were watching like moronic spectators at a football game. But when I saw the man who had opened the door pull a knife from his pocket, the animal in me awoke as well.
I charged forward at a speed that would make Olympic track stars pack up their gym bags and go home. I leaped through the air and collided with the metal railing at the top of the stairs. I hurtled over it to tackle the man backwards, but we tumbled over the railing on the other side and hit the ground hard. The fall knocked the wind out of him, but I felt nothing.  In what seemed like one fluid motion, I kicked him so that he flung onto his back, jumped on top of him, and pinned his arms above his head.
The feeling of my teeth elongating to the shape of fangs was definitely the weirdest sensation I had experienced up to that point. Admittedly, my heart flung itself upwards in nauseated surprise just as my hands flew to my mouth to touch them. The only teeth that had grown were my canines and first incisors; they were almost how I would expect vampire fangs to be. The only differences were that there were four fangs instead of two, and they were much thicker than vampire teeth, and as a result, more durable. In that quick second of prodding my finger into the bottom of one fang, I managed to draw blood. Not only were they long but they were also very sharp.
As I touched the new, very strange additions to my mouth, the guard saw his chance to bring me down. He thrust the hand that held the knife forward, going right for my throat. I dodged the attack in a blur of movement and grabbed his wrist in one hand. I couldn't believe that he had tried to cut my throat; the thought infuriated me. At first, I hissed just as Alice had. Then, a soft growl rumbled in the back of my throat as I snapped his wrist in half with just a slight tightening of my fingers.
Just as he let out a wail of pain, I brought back my fist to punch him hard in the face. His scream choked off, and his eyes closed. In a frenzy, I looked around for any curious survivors that might have come around the end of the ship, searching for the source of the noise. I saw no one and breathed a deep, cleansing sigh of relief. In that breath, the instinct to fight and kill soothed itself, and I could have sworn, though this sounds insane, that I smelled the pepperoni, onion, mushroom, and sausage pizza that my mom, dad, and I ordered every Friday night for as long as I could remember.
“Quinn!” Alice exclaimed in a loud whisper, “Come on!”
The amazingly vivid smell disintegrated immediately, leaving me sniffing the air somewhat wildly. I begged for it to appear again from wherever it had come, because I needed the peace that had flooded through me the moment I smelled it to return. Instead, I had only the urge to run, fight, and sink my newly acquired fangs down into the vital arteries of anything that stood in the way of saving Brynna, a girl I had not met, but cared for because Alice did.
Elijah hurtled the railing the same way I had. He jumped into the open space as the metallic door began to slide shut. He pressed his back to one side of the doorway and kicked both feet up to hold the door open.
“Quinn, let's go!” Alice was shouting.
I scrambled up the stairs, and we ducked under Elijah's legs. Once we were inside, he rolled sideways, landing gracefully on all fours before pushing himself up to a standing position without moving his feet at all.
“You have to admit,” He grinned, “It's kind of awesome, right?”
“Hell yeah.” Alice beamed brightly. 
All of us were trembling from the adrenaline rush our fight had stirred to life. I could see how people became addicted to thrills; as we faced death and pain, we embraced a perhaps nonexistent invincibility. In that invincibility, we were truly alive. We possessed the strength of bulls and the fighting prowess of lions; we were becoming more like animals every day. For the first time, I was excited about mutating. In the eyes of my two companions, I could see the same enthusiasm for our new animal nature.
I turned my head from right to left. On both sides, the corridor was eerily lit with dim bulbs. Both ways were identical. We could not be sure which way to go.
“Storage compartment, right?” Alice looked in either direction as I had. “I guess we should split up.”
“Famous last words…” I muttered, and Alice scowled at me in irritation, “Well, it’s true!”
“Do you have a better idea?” She asked, “We don’t have much time before Olivier’s people stumble on the guards we just took out. Once that happens, they’ll be coming in here, looking for whoever did it.”
“Yeah, we may be able to fight a few of them, but he has more people than you guys think. He thinks the only way to survive is by using force. So he brought plenty of force.” Elijah explained grimly, “We can’t take on all of them. We might be able to fight, but they have guns. So, you’re right, Alice. We need to get in and get out of here. You two go on. I’ll go alone.”
“No!” I exclaimed, “It doesn’t matter if we split up, because we have no way of telling one another if we find her! We need to stay together! Look, let’s just take thirty seconds and try to use whatever these weird powers are that we have.”
“What do you mean?” Alice asked, and I could see that her aggravation was growing as she became more frantic to find Brynna and get out.
I realized suddenly that I was sick of feeling like I was running out of time.
“I don’t know. Just…” 
I closed my eyes and allowed the creature inside of me to take hold. It was instinctual and at times, close to knowing things that we could not possibly know on our own. They were staring at me, rendered silent by what they believed was just a stupid attempt to tap into a psychic side that didn’t exist. But I knew that I could at least gather which direction was the correct one in order to more quickly find Brynna.
“This way.” I pointed to the left side of the corridor, “Yeah, shut up, fools.”
“We don’t even know if you’re right yet!” Elijah called after me as we all ran down the darkened hallway.
“I am right. Don’t start doubting the powers, man!” I called back.
I stopped running suddenly and thrust my arm back to keep them from continuing on. The three of us carefully moved to see around the wall. With a drop in each of our hearts, we watched as Daniel Olivier began to walk in our direction, his brows furrowed in a question. He thought he had heard something, and he was coming to see if he really had.
“Elijah!” He called down the hallway, “Go back outside.”
Elijah went to move around us, but Alice reached out and grabbed him, shaking her head. However, after looking into his eyes, she let go of him. Though there was rage in them, it was not the rage that we had to embrace before we could hurt someone. The same way Alice had a plan, he did as well.
“Has she eaten?” He asked Daniel sourly.
“She had a few scraps of something. Well, we put a few scraps of something in front of her, and she didn’t eat it, because she’s hard-headed and absolutely determined to do the exact opposite of what I ask her to do. Either way, that’s all she’s getting right now. I know that it seems cruel, Eli. But I need to know what’s going on. I can’t protect you, your sisters, or Maura without knowing what exactly it is that’s happening to her.”
“And you think she knows?”
“I do. I think she knew this was going to happen to her. I think she knows what those natives want. You saw how calm their leader was when he spoke to her. It was only after we interrupted them that he threatened us.”
“That’s ridiculous, Dad. She just knew what she was doing. But as far as whatever made her change over to that, I don’t think it’s a threat. So, you need to go get her something else to eat.”
“No,” Daniel's voice was beginning to tremble slightly. Alice and I looked at each other, both worrying that at any minute, things were going to spiral completely out of control, “If anyone would be going to get her something else to eat, it would be you. But she’s not getting anything else. We can’t waste our food on someone like her.”
“Someone like her?” Elijah repeated in incredulous animosity, “She’s your daughter!”
“I don’t know what she is. But I know that if there’s one thing she’s not, it’s my kid. People are afraid of her. It’s my job as the person that is leading this group to make sure everyone feels secure.”
“And they feel secure while you’re starving them or threatening to shoot them if they walk near the forest or try to go off on their own?”
“I am doing that for our own good! If we give rations to everyone, every day, we’ll be dead in a month! I’m not exaggerating when I say that! We did the math! We never thought that so many people would come. We never…”
“So let people go off on their own, if that’s what they want!”
“Yes, let’s go into the forest, Elijah! The natives have already showed us what they’re capable of, so let’s piss them off even more by going into their territory.”
“This whole planet is their territory!”
“So what should we do? Do you want to load everyone back on the ship, so we can fly around for a few thousand miles, if we even break through the atmosphere at all? Do you want to keep going until…” He stopped and looked up as he took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice was firmly calm. 
“I am doing the best I can. I have to make the hard decisions. That’s fine, because I know I can do it. Can you say the same, Eli?”
“Are you asking me if I can starve people? Are you asking me if I can shoot people? Because the answer is no. If you’re asking me if I can make the hard decisions…” There was the sound of impact on someone’s face, and Alice and I jumped out from behind the corner to see that Elijah had rammed the butt of the gun into his father’s head, “The answer is yes. But that wasn’t really hard…”
I exclaimed in stunned elation, laughing as I walked out from behind the corner.
“That was badass, man!” I told him after clapping him on the shoulder, “Pistol-whipping him, what you said... You're like Clint Eastwood right now!”
“I feel like Clint Eastwood right now.” He grinned broadly.
“You don't look like Clint Eastwood when you do that.” I scorned him jokingly, “You look like Hannah Montana.”
“Sorry. How's this?” He scowled darkly, and we both laughed again despite the situation. My heart was racing, and I had the weirdest urge to jump from one end of the hallway to the other while laughing maniacally. But then, I also wanted to find my own evildoer to pistol-whip. The evolutionary change was wreaking not-all-that-unpleasant havoc on my brain, too.
“Dude…” Alice whispered as she looked down at Daniel lying unconscious on the floor, “You just knocked your dad out!”
“Did I give you the impression that I was fond of him?” Elijah asked through another slight chuckle that was offset by the way his whole body was still shaking with fury. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”
He pushed open the door to the storage room. All excitement and enthusiasm disappeared as he looked into the room where Brynna was being kept. 
“Wait out here.”
We didn’t follow him into the room, but we did look inside after he went in. Brynna’s head was hanging forward, her chin resting on her chest. Her face was beginning to swell on one side from where her dad had beaten her. I looked at Alice to find her looking at me. In her eyes, I saw the same question: What had been the point of hurting her? The answers to the questions he asked were lost on everyone who was changing over, including us. If her bruises and cuts were the physical evidence of a brutal interrogation, I couldn’t help but wonder if soon I would be sporting some of my own.
Or maybe it had been personal. Maybe it was just more evidence of her father’s cruelty that was only directed at her.
“Do either of you know anything about First Aid?” Elijah called out to us. 
Alice had worked at a daycare on Earth and was certified in both CPR and First Aid. She went into the room, and I followed behind her.
“Is that normal? The way her eyes are rolling like that?” Elijah asked as he freed Brynna’s hands with the key that had been hanging by the door. The dark part of my brain that made unwelcome suggestions in tense situations told me that Daniel had left the key right in her line of vision to taunt her. I hoped that I was wrong about that.
Alice had her fingers pressed to the pulsing vein in Brynna’s wrist. Her mouth was moving slightly as she counted out the beat, estimating when a minute was up, because she had no clock or watch.
“Her heart rate is a little fast. But that’s better than it being slow.” Alice informed us, “I don’t think it has anything to do with being hit in the head because…” 
Alice gently grasped either side of Brynna’s head and tilted it back. Very delicately, she pulled up one of her eyelids. We all watched as Brynna’s bright blue eyes gleamed in the dim light and as her black pupil contracted to the size of a pinpoint. 
“Yeah, her pupils are contracting. If she had a concussion, they would stay dilated.”
“So, what do you think it is?” 
Once Alice had moved out of the way, Elijah was kneeling in front of Brynna and grasping her face with both hands.
“I think she’s trying to keep herself awake. I think she’s hungry and thirsty, too. Had she been eating or sleeping well before this?”
“She hadn’t eaten or slept since we got here.” Elijah replied as he put Brynna’s arm around his neck and lifted her into his arms.
“Adjust her so she isn’t lying back like that.”
“I’m trying.” 
Elijah moved Brynna up so that she wasn’t tilting back in his arms anymore. Her head was rested snugly underneath of his.
“You got her?” Alice asked softly.
“Yeah. Just to tell you, Brynn, I know I’m not rescuing you.” He whispered softly to her, and I could have sworn I saw a small smile appear on her lips as though she had heard.
We walked quickly from the room, stepping over Daniel to continue back the way we came. As though to remind him even in his unconscious state how severely he had pissed him off, Elijah brought back his foot and kicked his father hard in the ribs.
“Well, that’s a new way to say goodbye, I guess.” Alice commented as we hurried along the corridor.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for years.” Elijah replied just as two guards walked out in front of us.
“Elijah, what are you…” One started to say, but Alice had lunged forward and tackled him backwards. 
A strange noise, a mix between a grunt and a roar, forced its way from my stomach out of my mouth as I ran forward and dropped to slide on my knees towards the second guard. Once I reached him, I spun sideways and kicked my feet out to knock his from beneath him. As he crumpled to the ground, I heaved myself up and landed on top of him. With both hands, I grasped his head and slammed it down into the floor.
We were running after that. We were ready for an army of them. I didn’t have to look at Alice or Elijah to know their eyes had turned over white; we were all on the hunt. Once we reached the door that led out of the ship, Alice pushed the button, and the door slid open, revealing to us that night had fallen. The second we stepped out of the ship, we heard the screams of the survivors as the natives attacked.
It was those shouts of pain and terror that awoke Brynna from whatever stupor she was in. She rolled sideways out of Elijah’s arms to land on her knees in the dirt. Before we had even turned back to look at her, she had jumped onto her feet, swaying as vertigo overtook her for a brief second.
“Penny and Violet…” She muttered to Elijah as he grasped her arms to steady her.
“I took care of it. They know what to do. Just run!”
None of us needed him to repeat himself. We took off running as another massacre matching the one that had occurred the night before unfolded around us. It took every bit of my selfish willpower to not stop and help those I saw being ripped apart. As I ran, I was sprayed with the blood from a woman’s stomach as one of the natives dug his clawed hands deep inside of her abdomen.
Senseless and evil and sadistic and cruel… Their attack infuriated me but also drove me to move faster.
In the chaos, we were separated.

Violet

Maura knew something was amiss. Though I did have anxiety, I rarely shook my leg rapidly up and down to betray that I was worrying. My fears were always silent and unnoticeable, even to her. But as I awaited the return of Elijah and Brynna, I sat with Penny in my lap and bobbed her up and down on my legs that refused to keep still.
“I can’t color in the lines when you do that!” Penny snapped at me suddenly, and I tried to stop. I also tried to avoid Maura’s gaze.
“What’s wrong, honey?” She asked in quiet suspicion after sitting down beside me.
I shook my head slightly and shrugged. If I opened my mouth, I would spill Elijah’s plan. If I looked at her, I would begin to cry, and that would be enough of a confirmation. I was going to have to drag her off into the woods. A part of me wished that I could leave her, but I knew that I couldn’t.
“I know you’re scared. But your father said all we have to do is run to the door of the ship, and they’ll let us in. Dad is going to take care of all of us. And he’ll come around with Brynna. He always does.”
I don’t know where she found evidence to draw that conclusion. A look back at our history was enough for me to know that he had never come around when it came to Brynna. Since Lucien had died, he had made my sister’s life hell. It hadn’t been her fault. In her mind, she believed that everyone, including me, blamed her. But she was wrong; Elijah and I knew that whatever had caused her daze, her blind ignorance to what was occurring, had to have been serious. She never allowed herself a moment’s peace from her raging thoughts and her constant attention to detail. Her love for Lucien had been strong.
Night seized us like a faceless threat. Immediately, some of the braver people flocked to the end of the campsite to watch the trees that had gone still suddenly. My heart pounded in anticipation as my arms locked around Penny. I was ready to make our escape.
“Maura, when I say to run, you need to run with me.” I told her, and she looked away from the trees to stare at me.
“What are you…”
A native zoomed up to her out of nowhere, evoking a scream of surprise from both of us. Out of reflex, she reached out and punched him hard in the face. It had been a punch thrown with every bit of force she could possibly muster and still, the native didn’t stumble. In fact, hitting him had only injured her. I spun Penny around so she was on my back and ran forward, bringing my own fist back.
When my fist hit him, he flew backwards and landed on his back. Remembering that I had Penny attached to me was enough to stop me from going after him and finishing the nasty, bloody work.
“Run, Maura, run!” I shouted at her. 
Before she could obey my order on her own, I had grabbed her hand and began pulling her with me as I took off running at a speed that she couldn’t achieve, being only human. I was forced to slow in order for her to keep up.
“Do not let go, Penny!” I yelled over the symphony of screams, running feet, slashing skin, and the pounding of bone on bone. 
Penny was crying through her own high-pitched wails of terror, but her grip on me was strong enough to pull my skin away if anyone tried to snatch her off of me. Even my little sister was beginning to gather the inhuman strength that had awakened in some of us.
“Where are we going?!” Maura screamed frantically over the overlapping, deafening sounds.
“We’re just running! DUCK!” I reached back and forced her onto the ground as a native soared through the air towards us. I whipped around, waiting for him to turn and charge us again. But his target hadn’t been Maura, Penny, or me; it had been a man five feet behind us whose throat he had just bitten into. I went to jump up, only to see several of my dad’s guards storming towards us, machine guns in their hands.
“Stay down!” I yelled to Maura. 
I pushed her down below the fallen log that I had only just seen kids practicing their balancing skills on the day before. I pulled Penny off of my back and wedged her in between Maura and me before laying both of them on the ground. Just as the gunshots rang out, Maura forced her way up from beneath me and covered Penny and me with her body.
The guards jumped over the log, firing blindly, and through Maura’s arms, I saw more of our number being taken down by the spray of bullets than the natives, who moved in a blur so quickly that shooting them was nearly impossible. I can’t begin to describe how horrifying it was, to see people I had begun to recognize by both name and face struck down by my father’s guards. They were good people who had survived the end of the world only to be shot by cowards firing blindly into the dark at targets they could not see. I knew that my father would not grieve their untimely, accidental demises. In fact, a part of me knew, and was sickened by knowing, that he would see their deaths as an all too welcome relief.
Once the men with the guns had passed us, I held Penny to my chest, waiting for her to wrap her legs and arms around me before we took off running again. Our hearts pounded, and our lungs threatened to collapse with each deep, heaving breath, but we didn’t stop. Our legs propelled us forward until we had broken into the cover of the trees.
“We need to keep moving!” I shouted over my shoulder to Maura as my eyes scanned every shadowed corner of the forest frantically.
“I can’t… I can’t…” Maura gasped out after collapsing onto the cold, pine-needle covered ground. I turned around and watched as she struggled for breath, knowing that until she had gathered her strength back, we couldn’t continue on into the trees.
“Maura, I know it’s hard, but we have to keep going.” I urged her as I continued to look all around. “If they want us, they’re going to follow us in here!”
“They live in here! We just have to wait them out. We can’t go any further!” She managed to exclaim despite her growing inability to breathe normally.
“We can’t stay at the campsite! They’re going to keep coming back! They’ll kill us all, Maura!
“Elijah… your father…” She paused for a long time before adding, “Brynna…”
“Look, I love Dad, but he made this worse for us!” I knelt down so that I was level with her and able to look imploringly into her eyes. “We can’t stay here with him!”
“So what are we going to do, darling?” She asked, and I was stunned to see that her eyes were ablaze with anger, “You’re going to do what Brynna tried to do and abandon him? You’re going to leave him the way Brynna left your mother?!”
Even as my need to keep moving stayed firmly rooted at the forefront of my mind, an animosity I couldn’t comprehend took hold of my heart. Maura was suggesting that Brynna’s abandonment of my mother saddened her. It took no intensified understanding of things for me to know that that was simply not true. Through my mother being left behind to burn on the earth, Maura had gotten my father. She was now the “wife” of the leader. After years of being beaten down by circumstance, she held a privileged position.
“If you want to stay, then you can stay.” I shot at her after standing back up. “I want you to come with me, because you’ve always been there for us, Maura. But if he’s more important to you than we are, then you can stay.” I turned away with tears welling in my eyes as I realized that Brynna’s dark feelings towards Maura might have been warranted. It’s a tough thing, seeing someone’s darkness at such a young age when before one had seen only light.
“It’s not that!” She told me after walking forward and grasping my arms, “Darling, you need to come back to the camp with me. Come back, and we’ll talk, alright? Of course I want to go with you. I don’t want to be anywhere else. But we cannot leave him to fight this on his own.”
“Do you really still see good in him, Maura?!” I shouted at her. Penny broke down into tears again. “Shh…” I whispered as I ran my hand down the back of her hair, “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m sorry.”
“I do. I do, because it’s still there. What he’s doing…” She shook her head slightly. I knew that she was trying to think of a convincing explanation for his heartless actions. “It is the difficult decision, but unfortunately, it’s also the right one. He has to keep a firm hand on these people, or there will be chaos. You are young. You do not understand that.”
“No. Contrary to what you may believe, I understand more than you do.”
I wanted to remain firm and angry. I wanted her to see no signs of pain on my face as I realized that she cared more for my father than she did for us, the children she had raised. But I loved Maura dearly because she had always been there. She had stepped into the role my mother had so willingly abandoned. For Elijah and me, at least, Maura was the only constant in our lives.
Tears streamed down my face as I turned to her and whispered, “Goodbye, Maura.”
Like the naïve child I was, I expected her to follow me. Even if she was cursing me under her breath, I still believed she wouldn’t let me walk away.
Her sobbing was drowned out by the noises that had come back to the forest. My feet moved me forward, carrying Penny and me closer and closer to an uncertainty that would never become clear. I knew Elijah and Brynna would find us if they had survived, but then what? What would we eat? Where would we sleep? How would we avoid the natives?
I forced my tears to stop for Penny’s sake. But inside, a terror as old as Earth and Pangaea roared as it took its first breath.

Brynna

I did not care if the natives heard me. The sounds in the forest had resumed their deafening musical number, and I screamed over the noise for Elijah, Violet, and Penny. Once or twice, I even called Maura’s name, though to see her when I expected to see only my siblings would have been truly sickening. I almost chuckled at the thought of vomiting right on her designer tennis shoes.
I had been walking for hours, knowing that the attack on the campsite was over and that the natives were back in the woods. I was exhausted beyond feeling any degree of fear. I was hungry enough that when I passed by a bush stocked with orange and black berries, I actually stopped to pick a few. I held them to my nose, sniffing them for a reason that I could not fathom. It didn’t matter how they smelled; I did not possess any length of knowledge on plants that were edible versus plants that were deadly. However, my heart began to beat erratically fast, even tripping over itself a few times. The second I dropped the berries to the ground to grasp my chest, my heart had resumed its normal gallop.
Alright, instincts. Message received.
“Elijah!” I called as my eyes widened in the darkness. I could see the clear outlines of the trees and the shadows that moved between them. I looked up, seeing the twinkling of a billion stars overhead. The canopy created by the clustered mass of abnormally large willows blocked their light. I was seeing in the dark because my body was forcing itself to see.
The space around me was open, and yet I felt as though I had been shut inside of a coffin. All around me, I was surrounded by the hodgepodge of trees. Their age yielded a silent knowledge of all that had passed, from the beginning to the present. Despite standing for thousands upon thousands of years, they still smelled as youthfully fresh as they had when they were mere saplings planted by the Gods.
Such strange thoughts to be having…
I broke into a clearing, knowing I had put miles between the campsite and myself. There was no turning back now. My sense of direction had always been skewed, but in that case, it was downright nonexistent. I would die of dehydration or starve before I found my way back to the campsite. Not that I wanted to return, of course…
My thoughts turned to my mother quite randomly. If my father had been on the ship, then common sense would dictate that he had not been with her. They had been living together even though their marriage had long been over. My father had so many mistresses, I used to say he had a harem. His age did not diminish his good looks, and as a result, many women, even those my own age, had desired him. Power certainly had something to do with their attraction. Thoughts of acquiring a fraction of his wealth surely aided their ability to devote themselves to him. They had disgusted me, those dirty little girls. How they could look at such a terrible man with even fake affection in their eyes, I did not know. But then, for once, I did not want to know.
My mother had an on-again and off-again relationship, as they are called, with a good and honest man named John. I had been stunned to learn that he was the foreman at a construction company that specialized in building expensive homes. That was how they had met; he had built the sprawling fortress that we called our house. Their relationship had begun shortly before what had happened with Michael. I remembered how he was the only male I trusted enough to allow in my presence after those unspeakable events with my godfather. In fact, my mother had taken me to stay with her at his house several times, just so I would feel safe. Once there, I spoke and laughed as though nothing at all had happened. I was, quite simply, a normal nine-year-old girl once again.
Remembering this makes me very sad.
I had always liked him. Despite his sex, I had trusted him. For a moment, I prayed to God, the Gods, or the empty space above my head that he had been with my mother when the event had occurred. I prayed that even though they had not been on good terms in many years, he had held her and assured her that they were going to be alright. They would not feel any pain. Everything would be over in just one millisecond, and he would hold onto her even after they had passed over to the other side.
I stopped abruptly, almost tripping over my feet in the process. Tears had slid out from the corners of both eyes in a rushing, violent, and almost unstoppable assault. I breathed heavily for a moment, swatting at my eyes to wipe them away. From the bottom of my stomach, I felt a bubbling, gnawing scream clawing its way up my chest and into my throat. My harried breaths hitched in my throat, and I struggled to continue breathing as my heart raced; it beat my insides to a bloody pulp as an agonizing punishment for what I had done. My hands flew to cover my mouth as I stomped my feet; to the audience of trees, I must have looked like a child holding her breath during a tantrum thrown to acquire some coveted prize.
A stirring in the bushes snapped me out of my reminiscences, noncommittal yet truly heartfelt prayers, and my somewhat maniacal fit of suppression. I ducked down, falling onto all fours and taking a huge inhalation of air. Where only a moment before, my lungs had been filled with something heavy and acidic, now they were clear and clean. The rustling in the bushes had snapped me back to the common realm where I did not have to feel.
I knew it was a native. They had been hunting me the whole time. I looked up, my breathing becoming heavier as I stared into the bushes that were moving sporadically but forcefully each time. Whoever it was, they were big. They would take me down easily. I would have to fight with weakness, as my strength had long since fled me. I would be killed without a doubt…
Instead of a person walking out, though, a lion the size of a small car came strolling towards me. In the silver light streaming through the break in the canopy, her huge blue eyes gleamed. I did not know whether to run or stare. 
From her throat, she was emitting a low rumbling sound that sent a wondrous feeling of comfort through my body. It was not a growl of warning. It was more of a purr. I fought it for a moment, but a smile spread across my mouth as I stared with the awe of a child. I pushed myself up so that I was standing again. I knew not to approach her, though I could not be sure whether she would attack me or not. She was a monstrous beast that should have wanted to consume me for dinner, though I would have been less than an appetizer given her massive size.
The blue of her eyes was the strangest. Like glowing sapphires in the dark, they looked back at me searchingly, as though she had silently posed a question. When her head tilted sideways, I chuckled; I did the very same thing when I was confused.
“It is alright, beautiful.” I told her, “Though most people do not like me, most animals do. I’m pantheistic. ‘Humble before the smallest ant.’ I mean that in all sincerity.”
As though to tell me that she believed what I was saying, she sauntered forward a step. I backed up, gasping in surprise and slight alarm. But then, when her tail swished and the quizzical look resumed on her face, I squeezed my eyes shut and reached out a hand.
I laughed before I had even looked over; she had pressed the top of her soft head against my palm. When I scratched her ears with both hands, she laid down on the forest floor, purring loudly.
On Earth, we had feared beastly creatures. Though I was sure that many animals on Pangaea would gladly eat me, I sensed an innocence in most, because they had not yet learned to fear us. I wondered briefly if my views on wildlife had been accurate, if we truly were meant to share the earth with them by participating in a symbiotic relationship until we departed the world.
After a long while, a yowling far off in the distance drew her away from me. I was able to recognize her instinct to protect and care for the small cub that was making the noise. Through that rabid protective instinct, she would kill me if I followed. I knew better than to tread into her territory when her babies were resting there.
I turned to keep walking, smiling ever so slightly still. To look into that creature’s eyes, to see a mutual respect there between us, had been odd. But it had also held a degree of magic that I had scarcely been aware existed on this planet or the last. Seeing her had soothed that charged, frayed, electrical eruption that had overtaken me so suddenly.
Perhaps I was just tired, and as usual, reading too much into things, but a strange recognition had been present in the lion’s eyes. In fact, her eyes had been the same shade of blue as mine. It had been so clear to me that this creature had seen me before…
No. I was allowing the mysticism of the encounter to cloud my rational judgment.
The first blue light of dawn was beginning to stream through the leaves of the varied trees; that light illuminated my path for me. Morning was the time of day when the air smelled the cleanest. I breathed deeply, my head angled upwards towards the lightening sky as I walked. When I looked ahead, I stopped abruptly once again.
A tent, branded with the letters “USA” in black on the side of its green plastic covering was set up in my path. Outside, there was a chair, three books, and seven boxes of rations, two of which had been devoured.
I did not know for sure, but I suspected strongly…
I would venture to guess that no one but him had managed to escape into the woods, least of all with a tent and seven boxes of rations.
He was dead. If he were still alive, he would have come out of the tent. He would have sensed me moving ever closer to him as I walked. My legs moved forward, forcing my body to approach the sight I could not bear to see. I could close my eyes, but I knew that they would only force themselves open again in response to their own grim sense of curiosity. My heart was what I could not control most of all. It would shatter into jagged, cutting pieces upon seeing him dead.
But before I could begin to unzip the tent’s door, it flew open. I realized that I was pinned on the ground before feeling the pain of being held down so firmly.
A native! A native was hiding in there! I would be dead in seconds, ripped apart like a pig in a slaughterhouse… A knife was pressed to my throat, and I struggled to free my hands so I could swipe it away…
“Brynna?”
His voice stirred me out of my panicked stream of thoughts. I stopped fighting, and my eyes snapped open. I could have cried at the sight of his handsome face. I reached up, my eyes dissolving back into the shade of blue that matched the sky above our heads.
“I thought you were…” I stopped, unable to finish, because what I had thought had been so terrible. I was still lying on the ground when his arms wrapped around me quickly. My own were grabbing onto him as my lips moved feverishly over his face. He came down, kissing me hard on the lips with a longing and a passion that matched my own. When his mouth moved to my neck, I knew that our reunion was headed down a physical path I had never been comfortable with enough to actually tread down before. The first several times had not been my choice. I had been too afraid and too sickened to try it again after that. I will admit that I had been afraid for years, and as I locked my arms around James, even though I wanted to so badly, I was still afraid.
He sensed that in me and pulled away so he could put both of his hands on my face.
“We don’t have to.” He whispered to me, and I saw in his eyes that his concern was genuine and far more critical in determining the outcome of the situation than his sex drive was. That moment was enough to convince me that James was the man I was meant to do that with for the second, but also the first, time. I sat up and pulled him back to me so I could kiss him again. I grasped both of his hands and placed them on me, telling him without words that I wanted, more than I could say, for him to touch me.
“Just rip it!” I ordered as he attempted to pull my tank top off, only to be stopped by the built-in bra that kept it firmly rooted to my torso. He grasped the fabric in both hands and ripped it down the center.
My entire body was trembling; every part of it that was not shielded by his body was left utterly numb by the frigid morning air. My muscles were locked; my entire body was frozen, preparing for pain, because there would be pain, wouldn’t there? I could not be sure if it ever felt alright; I was so intelligent, but so clueless about those sorts of things…
“Look at me.” James said gently, because my eyes had dropped closed by their own will. I tried to become aware of my limbs again, and after a second, I felt the back of his neck under one of my hands and a fistful of his shirt clenched tightly in the other.
“Brynna…” His lips pressed to mine more gently than they ever had, and the warmth that stirred inside of me caressed the muscles that I was holding so tautly, massaging them until I was able to relax, however slightly. 
“Look at me, baby.” He said again, and I did, “We don’t have to do this. I don’t want to, not if you’re not absolutely sure.”
I brought one of his rough hands to my lips. I nodded, kissing it once, before whispering, “I am sure.”
He saw the pure fear that I could not hide. It was not of him; it was of the vulnerability such an act required of me. I had never been able to have sex with anyone, because I had never allowed myself to be seen as weak. Giving myself over to another human being was a thought so terrifying that it could have stopped my heart without warning or prolonged pain.
But James’s warm brown eyes comforted me, assuring me that he was a good man with no intention of hurting me or using that vulnerability against me once it was over. He would be gentle and mindful of my fear, self-consciousness, and inexperience. He would prove to me that what I had experienced as a child was a perversion of an act meant to be used only as an expression of love.
He was less than honest, but he was good. The majority of his heart was admirably kind, and that kindness was part of the reason why his touch filled me with that peculiar but brilliant warmth. I never would have allowed any of what had occurred between us had he not been so good. 
“James…” I whispered, and my throat locked up, but I shed no tears. “Is it going to hurt?”
“No.” He assured me softly, “I won’t let it. I promise.”
I nodded, looking into his eyes again. Simultaneously, I pulled him down towards me gently and rose to meet him halfway. The joining of our lips sent that warmth spreading outward rapidly in undulating waves over every inch of my skin. It plunged past the surface, far down into the deepest parts of me. His hands moved from my hips that he was grasping up my back, and he unhooked my bra. My breathing deepened suddenly, and when his kiss moved down my neck slowly, my lips parted, and a half-moan escaped me. I was barely aware of the cold ground under my back when he laid me back down again, because his mouth was going further down than my neck now. My hands were on his shoulders, and my fingers locked hard on them when his mouth enclosed over one of my breasts. The half disappeared; now I was moaning outwardly, in between deep breaths.
My legs parted for his hand when he reached down to rub me gently, first over my underwear and then, when I began to physically ache for him to touch me completely, he was. He kissed me from the bottom of my stomach up to my lips again, all the while rubbing me slowly, perfectly.  
“Are you ready, baby?” He whispered gently. For the first time, I became aware that he certainly was ready.
I nodded, holding onto him with my shaking arms.
“Just relax. There you go. That’s it.” 
Very gently, he pulled my underwear down. I was shaking so terribly and holding onto him so tightly. 
“Are you absolutely sure?” He asked me again.
“I’m sure.” I nodded, “I trust you, James.”
And I did. Truly, I trusted him more than I had ever trusted a living soul in my life.
He looked at me for a long second, and then he kissed me again, more passionately than before. I squeezed his back when his forehead rested against mine. His hands rubbed up and down my thighs, the muscles of which were held as stiffly as they could possibly be held; with each movement of his hands, they relaxed a little bit more, falling apart for him again… 
I gasped.
***

“It’s freezing, crazy.” James told me as I stood up to pull my cigarettes out of the pockets of my jeans. 
I laughed softly and scurried back over to him with the pack in hand. I laid back down beside him and rested my head against his chiseled, bare chest. I looked up at him, unable to keep the smile from my face. He looked down at me, smiling softly, too, his fingers twirling in my hair. He kissed me for one long moment that filled me with that warmth that still intoxicated me.
After we had both reached the breathtaking end of our romantic foray (and I had come very close to reaching it, surprisingly enough), James had scooped me up into his arms and carried me into the tent. Once inside, he had laid me down, covered me with his sleeping bag, propped up a pillow behind him and crawled underneath the blanket beside me. I had heard a rumor once that some men were not appreciative of their partners lying on them after the actual sex was over, but I chanced it with James, because I needed that comforting physical contact with him. I knew by the way he encased me in his arms that he was not one of those aforementioned men.
“So tell me,” I lit two cigarettes and handed one to him, “Was that at least satisfactory?”
He looked down, giving me a look that shouted, “Are you kidding?”
“It was miles above excellent, actually.” He answered, “Are you okay? How do you feel?”
We laid down so that we were facing each other. Our conversation was taking a turn for the serious, and we needed to see the flickering of each emotion that passed on the others' face.
“I feel...” I tried to find a word that fit exactly what I was feeling, only to realize that there was more than one, “I feel happy. I feel amazed. I feel safe.”
“So, it's all positive emotions, then?” He asked me with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “Not the need to run?”
“Are you trying to dampen the mood?” I asked, but that small grin was still on my face. I had not used the many muscles it took to smile like that since I had been a small child. They were sore from the effort, but I barely noticed; I was too entranced by what had happened between us to feel any pain.
“Not at all.” He replied as he exhaled smoke. “I was only curious.”
“I do not want to be anywhere that is not right here with you, James. I need you to know that. I cared so much these past several days about your dishonesty. But I have let it go.”
“You were right.” He told me instantly, “I should have been honest with...”
I sat up and held my lips to his for a long, dazzling second.
“It's alright. Let's just move on from it.”
“Well, let me just say before we forget it that it will never happen again. I promise you, Brynna, I will never lie to you again. You had every right to be angry. I couldn't accept that at the time. I didn't understand it. But now I do. That, for you, is the ultimate betrayal. It won't happen again.”
I put both of my hands on his face and whispered, “I know, James.”
I took his arms and wrapped them around me. Once I was snuggly bundled up, I rested my head against his chest.
“We can only stay like this for a few more minutes, and then we have to go find Elijah, Violet, and Penny.”
“They're out here?” James asked.
“Of course. You didn't think after all of this that I would leave them behind, did you? But then, I wasn't really the one who saved them this time. They saved themselves.”
“From what?”
“It is such a long story. I'll tell you while we're looking. For a few minutes, though, just don’t let go of me.”
We were silent for a moment, our bodies pressed together to shield ourselves from the bitter cold of morning. 
“Can I tell you something?” I asked, looking up at him.
“Of course you can.”
“I never thought I could do that with anyone. You suggested that you knew what had happened to me. Do you know the extent of it?”
“I don't know the details. But the outline is enough.” He replied, and darkness came over his eyes that I had not been expecting to see. A fury that rivaled and perhaps surpassed my own was ablaze in his heart.
“There is no use being angry over it anymore, honey.”
Wow. I was even able to call him by a pet name, a phenomenon in relationships that I had always found pathetically stupid and inescapably pointless.
“I know. I just hate that you had to go through that. No one should have to go through that, let alone a young girl. Do you mind if I ask...”
“I think you have the right to ask about it now.”
“That's not true. That's your story to tell, and don't let anyone ever say differently. You don't have to share that with anyone you don't want to. But if you do want to tell me, can I ask how old you were?”
“Nine.”
I surprised myself with the candid response. I had always run when the subject had been broached by anyone from my mother to reporters to a stranger who had read about the trial. But with James, I was safe. I could be honest with him without fear of being rejected or looked down upon. That safety was essential.
“Nine...” He repeated in very slight disgust. He was attempting to hide his anger from me, because he knew that I would be upset by it. I did not want two of us to carry the burden. It was mine to carry, and I would not inflict it on anyone else.
He must have read those thoughts in my mind, because he looked down at me in surprise.
“I'd carry all of it for you if I could. I'd take that pain from you, no question, if I could, Brynna.”
Tears rushed into my eyes upon hearing those words. I had been able to garner the strength it required to overcome my fear of intimacy, but I was still not ready to let him see me cry. I blinked several times as I kissed him again, feeling the tears slowly disintegrate back to wherever they had come.
“Physical intimacy always scared me, perhaps irrationally.” I said after a minute, “I couldn't stand the idea of feeling so vulnerable. I could not even think about allowing someone to get that close to me. It is the ultimate closeness, isn't it, when it is done for the right reasons?” I was quiet for a moment, but he did not speak to fill the space. He wanted me to continue. 
“With you, it's right. I have never been so sure of anything. We might be a strange pairing, but the feeling that this is the way it was supposed to happen is so strong, I could not deny it if I tried. I am so happy that it was you. I do not care about anything else. I just know that this was right. I would not have done it otherwise.”
He kissed me softly again, and a delightfully sensuous shudder passed through me when I felt his tongue moving gently against mine.
“I am so glad to hear you say all of that. And after all we have been through, I am truly honored to have been the one you let that wall down with. I mean that when I say it, baby. I really do. And I will make sure you never regret it. That's a promise.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face in them. His smell was so intoxicating, and his body was so firm and strong against mine that I wanted to make love to him again. Once we got up, we were back to fighting the faceless forces in pursuit of us. I wanted to lay there with him, warm under the blanket and safe in his arms until the end of my life. The moment we pulled apart, the world would come barging back to the forefront of our consciousness. The fall from the heavenly space we were currently occupying would be as abrupt and painful as being jerked from a pleasant dream by the screaming cry of an alarm clock.
But alas, reality was shriller than any man-made annoyance. We dressed quickly to avoid becoming too cold. We packed up his tent and rations before setting off in pursuit of Elijah, Violet, and Penny, hand in hand.

Quinn

“Alice!”
I had been shouting for hours, and my voice was getting hoarse. As the time passed from the last moment I had seen her, my worry grew into downright terror. I didn't even know for sure that she had made it out of the campsite. The only way I would know if the worst had happened was if I doubled back and returned, but I had been wandering for so long that finding my way back would be nearly impossible.
It was midday. The sun was high in the sky and casting through the trees to create an oddly calming green glaze on everything I saw. If only I was able to embrace the tranquility that my eyes were drinking in. It seemed so out of place, and yet I wished for nothing more than to sit and submerge myself in it.
We were in enemy territory. The natives lived in the woods and could have converged on me at any second. I would be dead before I even saw them. I was unable to move as quickly as they did even with my new strength and power. They were blurs of death: swift, lethal and inescapable.
“Alice!”
Now my voice had gone. I wouldn't be able to call her to me. The harsh sun was weakening me; I was sweating profusely and wiping my face on the back of my hands. I had to sit and rest for a minute.
We hadn't planned our escape nearly as well as we thought. We should have packed a bag with water and food. Instead, we took off into the woods with nothing but the clothes on our backs. Now, we were going to be forced to find a source of water. It took three days to dehydrate. The human body could survive without food but would crumple in no time without that precious liquid revitalizing us.
Maybe our evolution would allow us to go for longer periods of time without water. Somehow, I doubted that was true. As I tried to focus on anything other than the scratchy dryness of my tongue, my mind ran through images of lakes, streams, dripping faucets, and ice cubes one right after the other like a screen-saver meant to torment me.
My Anthropology teacher had told us that our war for oil was pointless and only temporary. Soon, the war for water would erupt. It was far more pressing. The consequences were far more severe. Maybe the apocalypse we had experienced was a more favorable one than what would have occurred otherwise.
My mind drifted to Brynna Olivier and her family. In Government, Alice and I had learned about her mother and the “Starting Five.”
“Corruption!” My slightly unhinged Government teacher had exclaimed as he slammed his fist on his desk for emphasis. Beside me, Alice had snorted through her nose and covered her mouth as she tried to suppress a giggle. Watching him lecture on those public officials that he deemed morally corrupt was entertaining, to say the least. Well, it was only entertaining when we, his students, disregarded the fact that his blood pressure was visibly rising, and he could fall over from a heart attack at any given moment.
“You might find this funny, Alice, but this is your future! The 'Starting Five,'” He drew out the name to emphasize his disdain and disgust for those involved in the group, “They have driven us so deep into debt that you, your children, and your children's children will be paying it off! They have stepped on every foreign leader's toes that they could. They started this conflict we’re in, and they made every country choose a side! We thought we had it made. We thought we had finally reached a new golden age in this country, but now, we teeter on the brink of total chaos!”
Yes. This was all coming from a man hired to mold impressionable young minds.
“Another world war is just around the corner, and you're laughing!”
“I'm not laughing,” Alice had replied, but she was still covering her face to hide her smile, “I'm taking this very seriously.”
“They're stepping on those other governments, because they're afraid of them calling our debt! We’re all indebted to each other after the Expansion, and yet here we are, ordering them to pay us back when we have so much to pay ourselves! If it were me, I would be down on bended knee, trying to please them.”
“This is America, Mr. Frank,” Alice grinned, “We don't get down on bended knee for anyone.”
Our like-minded classmates had clapped after she said that. But I had known that despite his flair for dramatics, he was right.
It's amazing how the things I had learned in school, while seeming so tedious and pointless in the broad outline of our young lives and our futures, made so much sense now when it meant nothing. At the time, even though I knew that what my teachers had said about things had varying degrees of truth, I still wasn't worried. But now, my knowledge yielded to understanding. My understanding yielded to anger. They had done this to us. To speak broadly, we had fled our earth for Pangaea to avoid a disaster they had created. To narrow it down, if Alice was dead now, it was their fault.
It's so easy to pass the blame sometimes.
I forced myself to push away my insight into the deeper meaning of all that was happening to focus on the task at hand. I needed to find Alice. Together, we would find the Oliviers. First and foremost, I was afraid for my girlfriend. But I also couldn't stand the idea of Elijah and Brynna's younger sisters out in the woods, alone.
“You're going to dehydrate if you keep walking briskly that way.” A voice said behind me. I whipped around abruptly, pulling a thick branch from the tree closest to me without realizing I was doing it. I turned and held my makeshift weapon out in front of me, ready for the fight.
My impulse to attack was stopped dead by the sight of Brynna and the man who had accompanied her out of the ship standing before me.
“Put it down, honey.” She said softly after turning back to the man with her. When he did not lower the large knife he was outstretching, she pushed his hand down gently. I was thankful that she was there to stop him, because I knew that if I had encountered him myself, he would have killed me. Looking into his eyes, I was sure of that.
“This young man was part of my retrieval operation.” Brynna explained to him, “I owe him quite substantially.” Her tone fell upon saying that. Brynna was not comfortable being indebted to anyone, even someone as non-threatening as me.
“Forget it. Have you seen my girlfriend? She's about 5'4, blonde, blue eyes...”
“I know what she looks like. I saw her when we were fleeing the campsite.” Brynna replied shortly.
Her disdainful tone was just about the strangest way to thank me for saving her life. I figured I wouldn't call her on it just yet. But if it continued, I would surely bring up how Alice and I risked our lives to help her.
“How very stereotypical of youth, Quinn Wesley.”
“I never told you my name. How do you know my name?” I demanded, wondering if I should have dropped the branch. Maybe she really was a Pangaean spy...
“I can read your thoughts. Basic information like that stays at the forefront of our minds, strangely enough.”
“What are you talking about? What's stereotypical?” I asked.
“Your need for thanks. Your need for recognition of your heroic actions. I do very much appreciate it. However, I am not going to change my inherent behavior in order to make that gratitude known.”
“You'll warm up to her. If I can, anyone can.” The man behind her told me. In his voice, I heard a slight exasperation.
“Who are you?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” Brynna told me.
“I'm James. You're Quinn. Nice to meet you.” He reached out his hand to me, and I shook it. He might not have thought twice about killing me had he stumbled upon me while alone but then, I probably would have reacted the very same way. The territory was hostile, and our lives were all we had.
“Have you seen my siblings running through here?”
“Don't you think I would be with them if I had?”
“I do not know. Maybe you are like this odd man, and you enjoy being alone.”
The way she wrapped her arm around James's back as she said that alerted me to the fact that they were a couple. I looked between them, trying to calculate the age difference. At the very least, it was twenty years.
“I don't enjoy being alone. I didn't really have a choice last time, did I?” He grinned broadly at her. With a slight smile on her face, she rolled her eyes.
“I suppose not.” She replied before looking back at me again. “Oh, look, he is very confused. That is also quite stereotypical of youth.”
“Aren't you like, twenty?” I asked her, though her age was none of my business.
“Twenty-two, dear.”
“Okay. Well, first of all, I'm only eighteen.”
“Hmm...” She replied carelessly as she and James continued walking.
“So, that makes you only four years older than me.”
“Your point?” She asked patiently. She was not looking at me as she strode along lightly but instead, was gazing at the ground and up at the trees as though following a shouting match between the two. She was so incredibly odd, even back then.
“When you comment on youthfulness or whatever the hell it is that you're commenting on, you're being weird.”
“That is her typical state of being. You might as well get used to it.” James responded over his shoulder.
“You're not that much older than me, so you're still young.”
“Only in physical age, Mr. Wesley.” She was looking up at the sky that was darkening overhead. “It is going to rain. Your girlfriend is very close. Her scent is on the trees, and her footprints are on the ground.”
“What do you mean, her scent? You can smell her?”
“That hasn't happened to you yet?” James asked me, and I looked at him in complete bewilderment as he pressed his nose to a tree and smelled it. “What do you think, baby? Maybe twenty minutes ago?”
“Less. Weren't you shouting for her at the very least?” 
Brynna walked past me, looking at the ground. When I didn’t respond, she looked back at me, eyebrows raised, silently demanding an answer to her question.
“Do you hear my voice?” I pointed at my throat as though she could see my voice box that I assumed was hemorrhaging from the force of my shouts.
“Did you bother to look down?” She asked snidely. She moved some leaves off of the ground delicately to reveal more obvious footprints. “She was treading lightly. Perhaps something was in pursuit of her.”
“Yeah, something was in pursuit of her: Me.”
“Well, did you give her any reason to avoid you?” Brynna asked, and she looked up at me over the tops of her glasses disdainfully.
“Of course not! The last time I saw her, we were running from the natives.”
“Is that what you've been avoiding telling me?” James demanded suddenly as he turned to face her abruptly.
Her jaw opened and closed once as she tried to come up with a quick answer to his question. After scowling at me darkly, she found her words.
“I have only avoided it because now is not the time to discuss it. You said you have seen other people that you did not recognize. They were not ours. There are other people here. What other knowledge do you require?”
“Are they dangerous? Are they...”
“Very dangerous. They can come up on you without you even seeing them.” I answered, “And they're strong, too. I saw one of them force his hand into someone's chest without cutting them open or anything.”
“I saw one rip a man's head from his neck.” Brynna added, “James, I was going to tell you all of this. Is there truly a goal that can be achieved by knowing all of this now? We should not be talking about this now while we are searching for Elijah, Penny, and Violet.”
“Hold on, I'm still lost. They've been killing people?” James continued the conversation, completely ignoring her request to stop it. 
We both stared at him, neither wanting to answer his question though we already had with our details. James had looped his large knife into his belt buckle at the back of his pants, but he reached back and pulled it out, checking the blade to make sure that it was still sharp enough to slash down a threat if we encountered one.
“They want us to leave Pangaea immediately. They ordered us to get on the ship and go. We tried to explain that there was nowhere for us to go, but they already knew. Apparently, they have been studying us. They can speak English because they have been watching us since the beginning of time.” Brynna explained grimly, “I do not know what their motive is. They said they would take ten of our number every night until we left. As you are very well aware, we do not have a planet to which we can return, so lest we wish to live on Mars, we need to make peace with them.”
“How?”
Brynna's expression darkened as her mind traveled to some not-so-distant memory. We would learn the details of her quick reminiscence much later. She never offered a verbal response, but her boyfriend appeared to know that look and its implications.
“We are going to talk more about this later, Brynna. Right now, we need to find everyone.”
“And then?” I looked between the two of them.
“That is the million dollar question, isn't it?” James replied with a nonchalant shrug. “I have enough rations to get us through a couple of days. Oh...” He reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water. “You're starting to look peaky.” 
He tossed it to me, and I caught it in one hand, taking a grateful chug immediately. I relished the coolness as it traveled through me. No drink had ever been so glorious.
They started to whisper softly, not realizing that though I hadn't developed a super sense of smell, my ears had begun to pick up the tiniest sound. As I sat and focused, I could hear the sound of some unknown animal treading lightly across the soft forest floor. My instinct told me that the creature was harmless, so there was no need to run. I could hear the leaves as they fell and their soft impact as they hit land. I could also hear James and Brynna's secret conversation.
“I was going to tell you all of this.” Brynna informed him softly.
“You keep saying that.”
“Yes, because I am being honest.”
“What are you hiding from me? There's something else. I know it. There's something that you don't want to say.”
“Don't you know by now that if I do not want to say it, it will not be said, James?”
“I'm not telling you that you have to say it. I'm asking you to.”
“I am well aware of that. I will say it when the time is right.”
“It's something that scares you.”
“It does not scare me. Stop your dramatics. You know that I am very difficult to scare.”
“I know that if you were scared, you wouldn't admit it. What does your father have to do with this?”
“It does not matter. Not at all, James.”
“It does matter. You should see how red your eyes are.”
“Do you have a mirror?”
“Ha-ha, you are so funny, sweetheart.”
“We cannot have this conversation now while Violet, Penny, and Elijah are out there alone. We are discussing this later.”
“Yes. We are.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
A smooching sound, and they were walking away from me.
“Hey!”
I ran after them, watching as they both bent over to observe the ground.
“She was running erratically.” Brynna told me lightly, “There are two bigger sets of footprints here. She was being followed. Well, not followed, actually. It appears that she was being chased.”
“By what?”
“They are human footprints, so we can assume the natives.” Her head jerked up suddenly, and she smelled the air. “I smell blood.”
I almost collapsed. But somehow, I was able to suppress my fear of stumbling across Alice's dead body long enough to run after James and Brynna when they took off speedily. We pushed through trees and bushes, hurtled over fallen logs, and jumped over a ravine at least eight feet wide and bottomless. All along, Brynna led us.
My senses came alive during that sprint. I could smell the blood mixed in with the scents of the greenery and mid-afternoon haze. Together, they were a tantalizing mixture that should have lulled me into hypnosis. I could hear animals stomping their way away from us in fear as though we were lions on the hunt. I could see clearly in my side vision deer-like creatures dropping to the ground and camouflaging in the dirt. Weird...
We heaved ourselves over three oaks that had fallen one right on top of the other. Our leap over them was effortless. After we landed, Brynna skidded to a halt. James stopped beside her. I slid in the leaves, and she was forced to reach back and grab a hold of my shirt to keep me from falling flat on my back like a total square. She didn't turn her gaze away from whatever was in front of her, though her face was taut as she suppressed some unpleasant emotion.
I looked, and my eyes widened.
I had little need to wonder why the scent of blood was so strong...
Alice was bent over one of the natives, her teeth sunk deep into his stomach. With a loud screech, she pulled back and ripped his skin away. Blood sprayed into the air from the gaping wound like erupting fireworks.
“Allie?” 
My voice was trembling, and my stomach was turning over in revulsion. Her head jerked up. Her white eyes met mine. For a moment, she spider-walked forward quickly on all fours, hissing.
“Allie!” I exclaimed as James raised his machete. I reached out, pushing his hand down abruptly. “James, don't!”
Her eyes dissolved back into their normal blue, and she pushed upwards so that she was standing.
“Quinn? They've been on me for hours. This one...” She pointed at the man lying face down in a pool of blood. “He was the first one. I didn't know there were two of them until I took him down. I know it's weird, and it's creepy...”
I backed away from her when she reached out to me. I had known that we were changing over to something that wasn't human. I had known that we could fight an enemy until they were hovering close to death. But I had no idea that we were actually going to kill people. I had seen her shoot that creature and collapse into a fit of rage, guilt, fear, and self-loathing as she realized that it was her mother. To take a human life, especially one of someone she loved, had been far too much for Alice to bear. Now, she was trying to justify killing this man.
“Quinn, I didn't have a choice. You saw what they do to people! They were going to do the same thing to me.”
“So, why didn't you knock them out?” I demanded furiously. I was shocked at my own anger and disgust. I had never been able to picture her killing something living. Unfortunately, I had stumbled upon her while she was in the act of it. It changed her in my mind from an innocent human girl whom I loved dearly to a monster I didn't recognize and couldn't possibly love at all.
“Don't tell me that you wouldn't have done the same thing if it had been you being attacked!” She replied defensively. “They were going to kill me. I wasn't taking them down. I was taking them out. It was the only way.”
“It wasn't. We got past those guards without killing them, Alice!”
“We were just trying to get onto the ship to get Brynna. Plus, they were only human! Quinn, please try to see this the only logical way. They were going to kill me so I killed them! I don't understand why you're so upset!”
“Because you think this is alright, just because we're here! You think it’s okay to kill people. You, the religious one out of the two of us, think it's okay to kill people without at least trying to find another way!”
“When they were ripping my head back, getting ready to rip my throat out, I wasn't looking for another way! I had no choice!”
“Well, you might not think so, but I do. And if I had been in your situation, I would have done everything in my power to avoid murdering someone, even a native! I might have been able to let it go if you weren't being so chill about it! If you had a little remorse, I might have been able to see you the same way. But no, you're perfectly fine with this and I can't agree with it, no matter who they are!”
“Children, we're departing.” Brynna spoke loudly over our shouts. “I hope your marital woes will soon yield a resolution that caters to your undying love.”
“We're not married.” Alice snapped at her, “Thank God! He's being unreasonable, right? Tell him he's being ridiculous!”
To be pulled into an argument that concerned neither of them apparently stunned them both, because their facial expressions were priceless. They were torn between trying to find the right words to say and wishing to keep silent. They wanted to stay safely out of the way of our anger.
Of course, Brynna, just like her mother, had an opinion on everything.
“Indeed, he is being unreasonable.”
And just like her mother, she was wrong about everything!
“Thank you!” Alice held her hands up in victory.
“Wipe the blood off of your face. It's disgusting!” I snapped. Admittedly, my outburst was immature, but seeing the way the natives' blood was dribbling from her lips down her chin and onto her neck was only making me angrier. It was a reminder of what she had done.
James grasped Brynna’s hand.
“Let’s walk away.” He told her,
“Yes. These conflicts do so often become contagious. Smart idea, honey.” Brynna nodded.
But as they walked away, Alice stormed after them, leaving me alone.
Maybe it was ridiculous. Maybe my anger was out of proportion. But imagine for a minute, stumbling upon the person you love snuffing out the life of a human being. Even though the Pangaean people were not humans, they resembled us perfectly. They had all the characteristics of beastly creatures, but physically, they were just like us. They had been born to parents who had loved them and raised them and now, a family somewhere was going to be grieving because Alice “had no choice.” I tried to see the situation from her perspective as I walked, but I knew that I couldn’t kill something of a human likeness. I couldn’t take someone out of this world who had an almost tangible history.
It makes no sense today. But in the moment, nothing could have been worse than knowing Alice’s blood was that of a killer’s and mine, in all honesty, was that of a coward’s. When I look at it in its most basic element today, that is the only conclusion to be drawn.
As I meandered about behind them, stuck in a frenzy of thoughts, I only saw the issue as Alice being a murderer and me being a moral person who would not take a life. Cowardice played no part in my beliefs. But the truth is, she was braver than me and always had been. It had been her idea to rescue Brynna. Before that, it had been her who had shot the creature that had broken into her house. I hated myself for it, but I felt emasculated by her drive to put an end to a threat whereas I could only hinder its violent efforts.
I didn’t realize that, being so young at the time. I just believed that I was right, and she was wrong. I was a good person, and she was a sadistic killer. Black and white thinking never helped anyone, and my own was making it impossible for me to see her in the same light that I had always seen her in.
I was stuck with her, though. We had come to Pangaea together and even though my feelings were irreversibly changed, I still couldn’t leave her. She was the only constant in my life. Pangaea was a dangerous place and not only because of the bloodthirsty natives. It was a one-eighty change from everything I had ever known, and Alice was the calm, stable center of it all. For her, I held the same role. Our relationship might have been effectively terminated before it had even really begun, but I couldn’t imagine living my life without seeing her every day.
Those thoughts were too much for me, in my young days. I thought I was so mature. After fleeing the earth, I assumed that I had to become a man by force of fate. I was nothing more than a little boy still, even after everything that we had survived. But, in perhaps undeserved fairness to me, I have to say that I couldn’t be blamed for still possessing such immaturity.
I looked at Brynna as she walked beside James. She was barely four years older than me and yet the distance between our dead Earth and Pangaea was shorter than the distance between our maturity levels. There she was, searching for her brother and sisters, whom I knew, from hearing Elijah talk, she had raised. Her body was that of a young adult, but her mind was on par with the man she was currently walking beside. I understood their attraction to each other more than I could understand anything else, including what I was feeling myself.
“I am glad you understand me. That was, strangely enough, my one goal in life.” She replied dreamily over her shoulder as her fingers linked with James’s.
“Stop it!” I exclaimed after covering my ears. She looked back at me and grinned in triumph and also, in curiosity.
“What is it about covering your ears? I am starting to believe that it means something. Maybe it is your instinct telling you that it will keep me out if you just try hard enough. Trust me, Quinn; I do not like hearing your thoughts as much as you do not like me hearing them.”
“Then stop!” I yelled again.
“Don’t worry about him, Brynna. He has always thrown tantrums like a spoiled baby.”
Brynna turned back to Alice, brows furrowed. For a moment, she just stared at her. Then, she spoke while shaking her head slightly in arrogant disbelief:
“We really need to work on your use of similes, darling. Perhaps a brainstorming of more creative options is in order.”
With that, she continued walking ahead. Alice watched her go, her face betraying how confused she was by what Brynna had said.
“What?” She called, but Brynna didn’t reply. She was bent back over the ground again, studying the footprints.
“Natives.” She replied carelessly before standing up and walking normally again.
“How do you even know?” I snapped irritably. I was starting to get very annoyed by her all-knowing presence. Was nothing sacred anymore? It wasn’t right that she allowed herself to travel so casually into my private thoughts.
“Don’t you just know things?”
“I do,” Alice answered, “Sometimes I do, I should say. You seem to be grasping whatever this is more than we are.”
“Some of us are more apt to embrace such gifts, especially when we were already predisposed to them. I am a genius, first and foremost, which makes the slight adjustment to my newly enhanced instincts and intelligence much easier.”
“Just because you can form long sentences doesn’t mean you’re a genius.” I told her icily.
“Trust me, man, she is.” James replied surely.
“Of course you’re going to say that.”
“Do not pass your animosity off onto us.” Brynna responded as she ran her hand over James’s back. Though she was speaking to me, her eyes were locked on his. “I have known you scarcely more than twelve hours. I will not bear the brunt of your emotional burden. I do not carry anyone’s baggage but my own.”
James kissed her quickly, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alice’s head cock to the side and her face contort in surprise. She hadn’t been aware that they were together.
James hung back to talk me down when I went to argue with his girlfriend further. Alice walked quickly ahead to accompany her through the thick brush up ahead. Clearly, my girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend now) was going to be asking Brynna some very personal questions about her and James. I knew that she was suddenly very curious about their relationship.
“Just to let you in on the big secret, I’ll tell you that she does that to push people away. She’d hate me for telling you that, but that is why.”
“Well, it works,” I huffed back, “I’d be willing to bet she had no friends on earth.”
“You would lose that bet.”
“Were you her friend?”
“No. I met her right before we left. I saw her in this dream I had. Do you remember me, from the meeting?”
I studied his face closely. It came back to me all of a sudden: Alice and I had spoken to him directly while we were at the meeting of people who had seen the end. He had been the man who had told us where to go. During that meeting, he also gave an impassioned defense of Brynna. The other people had said that she was too closely linked to those responsible for the impending catastrophe. He said that she couldn’t be blamed for her parents’ mistakes. In the end, he had won his fight for her. I wondered if she knew all he had done to ensure her survival.
“I do remember you!” I pointed at him, “James Maxwell, right?”
“The very same.”
“You were thinner then. You’ve gotten…” I couldn’t quite figure out how the describe his new appearance. “I don’t know. You’re bulkier.”
“I know. Don’t ask me where it came from, because I haven’t lifted weights or done a sit-up since high school Gym. As you can see by my age, that was a long time ago.”
“Yeah.” I replied, noting that up close, I could see the slight wrinkles by his eyes, and the laugh lines around his mouth. He was definitely pushing into his mid-forties. I looked at Brynna, and like a typical guy, noticed her tight, toned physique. Though James definitely didn’t look, at least in terms of his body, like any forty year old I’d ever met, their faces distinguished their age. Brynna’s was undeniably youthful, unblemished by any age lines. James’s age was beginning to show on his. There was no denying that she would find him good-looking, because he certainly was, for an old guy, but I imagined that some would find their relationship downright disturbing, despite any level of physical attractiveness in him.
“Before you tell me your story, can I ask you something?”
“By all means.”
“You and Brynna, you’re…”
He laughed softly for a moment and nodded.
“Yeah. It shocks me just as much as it shocks you. Look at her. Look at me.”
“It’s not that. Do people give you two a hard time?”
“Well, our relationship was platonic for those few days on Earth and for a couple of days on the ship. It was progressing, though. Her family was suspicious and disapproved. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t even know, really. It’s just Alice and I used to get looks in our town. Look at her. Look at me.”
He actually did look at her for a minute and then turn his gaze to me.
“You’re not like, forty years old, are you?” He asked, genuinely confused as to what I was alluding to.
“No!” I couldn’t help but laugh. He had a laid back, cool-guy demeanor that came naturally to him. Because of his age, I decided that he was like an awesome teacher I'd want to chill with outside of school. “I’m black. She’s white.”
“People still get themselves out of sorts over interracial relationships?” His expression contorted into one of surprise and disdain for such old school narrow-mindedness. “That was barely going on when I was young. Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Our parents hated the idea. They used to tell us we were pretty much going to get stoned to death if we went to the wrong places. I didn’t believe it at first but now, being here, I see it. Some people at the campsite looked at us strangely. I’m amazed, honestly, that it really does still exist. So, maybe this is for the best, that we’re not together anymore.”
“I didn’t realize you two weren’t together anymore. Is she aware of that?”
“She is. I think I made it pretty clear.”
“Can I be honest with you?”
“I guess.”
“I think you’re being ridiculous. Now, don’t get all defensive.” He held his hand up to stop me when I went to burst out with an angry retort, “I warned you that I was going to be honest. You can’t tell me that if those things had been on her, and there was no other way, that you wouldn’t kill them.”
“I don’t know if I would!” I exclaimed, “I don’t think I’d be able to.”
“Is that your problem? You think she can do something that you’re not strong enough to do?”
“It’s not strength, James. It’s whether I’m a good person or not! I guess I should apologize for not wanting to kill people. I didn’t realize that just because we’re here we get to forget everything we know about being good people! And what really burns me up about it is that she was always the one between the two of us who was religious! She was always telling me we had to live by whatever it is they talk about in the Bible.”
“So, you think she’s a hypocrite?”
“Yeah! Now that you put it like that, I do! I just…” I trailed off, rubbing my eyes for a minute as I tried to find exactly what it was that I wanted to say. “I just want to hold onto a little of what we had on Earth. That’s the bottom line, I think. The most basic law of living we had was ‘don’t kill.’ It was the worst offense we had, right? So yeah, while we’re here, I’d like to keep that in mind. If there’s another way, I’ll take it.”
“What if she’s right, though, and there was no other way?” James pressed me calmly. “What if you had come through there and seen them ripping into her stomach? What then?”
Touché. But of course, I wasn’t going to admit outwardly that he had trumped me with his reasoning.
“So what, you’re telling me if they killed Brynna, you’d make it right by killing them? What would that prove?”
“It wouldn’t prove anything. On Earth, we all possessed a degree of human emotion. Rage was one of the worst. Have you noticed that here, it’s amplified? It’s become more potent. Our emotions here are part of our instincts. They drive us. They enable our survival.”
“If you say so. But you still haven’t answered…”
“If one of those things hurt Brynna, I would kill it in the worst ways. They would feel every last second of it. It wouldn’t prove anything nor would it bring her back. But that’s the drive of our kind, do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I guess.”
“If one of those things were attacking Brynna, and it came down between her and it, I would kill it because of that, too. It’s the call of the wild, Quinn.”
“We’re not part of the wild, though! We’re human beings!”
He studied me for a long time before replying.
“Are we?”
“I am! I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m still human! I thought this weird mutation stuff was cool at first, but now I’m seeing that it’s replacing our… our… humanity!”
“That’s not true. If we possessed no humanity, I wouldn’t care what happened to Brynna.  I would only care about myself. Brynna certainly doesn’t need me to protect her. Alice proved that she doesn’t need you to protect her. They can take care of themselves. They always could, without our help, long before we came here. But if it comes down between me, Brynna, and the life of one of those things, I’m going to kill for our survival.”
I didn’t respond because I knew he was right. I had run out of retorts and exceptions to the new code we were living by on Pangaea. I wanted so desperately to hang onto the code of Earth, perhaps only for the sake of recognition. But I knew that my need for civility was bred from a fear of allowing my animal instincts to take over completely. What if they erased everything else?
“Just sleep on it. Let things ride for a few days. You’ll come to see that I’m right. I know that sounds cocky, but it’s true. What I’m saying to you is the truth. Think it over.”
No pondering was necessary. I knew he was right. As further proof of my immaturity, I refused to accept it.
Alice and I were finished.

Violet

Elijah had found us in no time. After he saw that we were safe, he quickly hurried off to find Brynna. He was operating on a grid in his mind; he walked in straight lines, using where Penny and I were resting as a starting point. In a blur, he would take off running until he felt he had gone too far. Then, he would return, move to the left by two feet, and run straight again.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was sitting beside me, huffing and puffing. I thought that he was catching his breath but in fact, he was crying. I had never seen my brother cry before, and I sat up quickly to wrap my arms around him. The moment I touched him, though, he jumped and furiously wiped at his eyes.
“It’s okay,” I told him gently, “Just let it out. You’ll feel better.”
“No. I need to stop it. It’s not helping us.”
“Just because you’re a boy doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to cry.”
“Yeah, it does,” He replied, “I’m just frustrated. It doesn’t matter how far I run. There’s no end to these woods, and I can’t find her anywhere. I have no idea where the hell she could be. She’s out there alone.” He paused, unsure of whether he should say what he said next. “I don’t even know if she’s alive, Vi.”
Admittedly, when I heard those words, my heart plummeted. Even after all the terrible things I had said to Brynna, I could not bear the thought of losing her. I had been furious, most definitely, but I had not meant those things. Though I still found it hard to admit, I needed her desperately.
“She is alive.” I told Elijah somewhat urgently but also convincingly. “Wherever she is, she's safe. There's a deeper meaning to all of this, Eli. There's some significance that we don't understand. Maybe we'll never understand it. But I don't believe that I would have had that dream only for one of us to die. There's no way Brynna would have saved us all only to be paid back by being killed. I just don't believe the universe is that cruel.”
He looked at me, smiling slightly and trying to suppress a bitter laugh. But when he spoke, I heard a condescension in his voice that reminded me of our lost sister.
“So, this 'deeper meaning' that would save Brynna is the same 'deeper meaning' that was responsible for an entire planet full of people being blown away by some huge explosion?”
“I know you're thinking that I'm naïve right now.” I snapped, “I know you’re being rude because you don’t believe in that stuff. But I didn't just say that to make you feel better. I do believe it, Elijah.”
“You would. You're still so young.”
“Me being seventeen has nothing to do with this!” I shot back angrily. “It's the truth! The natives are nothing. Whatever happens from here on out, I'm not going to be afraid. I refuse to believe that we would escape the earth only to die here.”
“Twenty people have died since we got here, Violet! They died brutally. The natives killed them because we're not welcome here. Not to mention, the countless people that died after taking that sedative. Where is all of that in the plan?”
I thought long and hard for a retort that would put the argument to bed. Coming up short, I just stood and started to gently shake Penny awake.
“You can sit here and cry, if that's what you need to do. But I'm not giving up on her.” I grasped Penny's hand as she rubbed her eyes sleepily, “Let's go, Penny.”
“Have you found Brynn yet?”
“No. Not yet, honey.”
Elijah followed after us, kicking rocks and stewing over his thoughts quietly. When we sat down to eat, he took his bottle of water and his bag of indistinguishable edible contents and hid behind a tree several feet from us.
“Why is Eli so mad?” Penny asked as she winked in the sunlight to look at me.
“He’s just mad.”
I shrugged the question off but knew that she would not be dissuaded from getting her answer so easily.
I was not skilled at hiding the emotional turmoil that was ever-present in our daily lives the way Brynna was. Under her watch, Penny had never known a detail of any familial conflict. That was quite a feat, considering that our family had more than its fair share of catastrophes, ranging from the mundane to the explosively devastating.
“Is he mad at me?” Penny asked, “I broke his cellphone.”
“Of course he's not mad at you!” I replied with a smile, “And what does he need his cellphone for, anyway? How did you break it?”
“I dropped it in the potty. He was letting me play with it. I was pretending that I was calling Jackie, and I tripped over my shoelace. It fell in the potty.”
“Oh.” I couldn't help but chuckle softly.
“Do you think Jackie is here?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think Mommy is here somewhere? I thought I saw her the other day, but it was just a lady who told me to go away and to tell my daddy he is a mean man!” She mimicked the woman by raising her voice, putting one hand on her hip and wagging her finger at me. I found her impression to be amusing, but the fact that a woman had said such a cruel thing to Penny made me angry. Our father's actions were in no way my five year old sister's fault, and it was certainly not her responsibility to deliver messages of discontent.
While I had been walking through the campsite with Nick, I had been well aware of the hateful glances that were being thrown my way. Of course, no one said anything out of fear that I would report back to my father. If I did that, their food and water would be kept from them, most definitely. In actuality, though, I wouldn't have said anything to him, of course. I would have handled it myself.
“Mommy will be here soon.” I lied uselessly. 
Penny may have been only five, but she was still apt to tell a lie from the truth. It's at that age that children begin to see through the farces of adults. The lies we tell them become nothing more than an inconvenient roadblock they have to hurtle over in order to reach the truth.
“Did Mommy stay on Earth?” She asked me, and immediately, her huge blue eyes filled with tears. No love had been lost between my mother and Penny, at least on my mother’s end, but Penny still recognized, however vaguely, that our mother was her mother. Penny only became a difficult child when she was in the care of Mom and Dad, and it was during those times that Mom furiously texted Brynna and demanded that she come pick Penny up. Regardless of that animosity, though, Penny still loved her, even if it was only because of the slight remembrance of being carried by her.
“No!” I reached out and embraced Penny quickly, “Of course not! She's here somewhere, honey. We just haven't found her yet. As soon as we find Brynna, we'll all go out and find her. We'll have her back with us in no time.”
“Will Maura and Daddy come find us?” She croaked out through her tears.
Now, despite giving Dad a hard time, and despite seeing him so infrequently, she did love him. In the rare instances that they saw each other, Dad became a completely different person, playing and laughing with his youngest child. Penny and Maura had always been close, because Maura watched Penny when my father forbade Brynna from doing it, and they had formed a tight bond over that very small amount of time.
Because of that love she had for them, I lied again.  
“Yes. They're meeting us soon.”
I was digging the hole deeper for her. I was doing her absolutely no good by continuing that charade of optimism. But I couldn't break her little heart. I would leave that task to Brynna. Penny was still so young, and Brynna allowed her emotions to flow unchecked. Despite how uncomfortable outpourings of grief made her, Brynna was able to comfort Penny more swiftly and effectively than anyone else alive. Our mother's death would be the first bombshell. Dad and Maura's subsequent abandonment would be the second. I did not envy Brynna's position in the slightest.
If I had been stronger, I would have taken that responsibility from her. I would have told Penny myself to spare Brynna from having to inflict such pain on our sister.
I was stunned at how quickly my anger had dissipated. I had truly hated Brynna during our time on the ship. After I had learned that she had left our parents to die, the only reasonable reaction was to loathe the very sight of her. It took seeing my father behave so brutally towards her for me to understand that if she had felt it was right to leave him, she had certainly had her reasons. Her relationship with my mother had been one of quiet hatred. At first, it had been one-sided; my mother began to hate Brynna the day my younger brother died. As her animosity grew, Brynna's defenses went up. Part of her defensive strategy was to hate my mother back. The mutual loathing spared her the pain of bearing my mother's punishment, which consisted of cruel and unbreakable silence followed by periods of harsh verbal abuse.
Our parents had decided to have Penny eight years after my younger brother was dead and buried. Even at twelve, I was well aware that Penny was meant to fill the void left by Lucien. But after she was born, Mom and Dad weren't satisfied. Their old, still-stinging grief was not rectified by the angelic baby girl. The brunt of the responsibility the baby presented fell on Brynna's seventeen year old shoulders, because Brynna had insisted on caring for Penny herself. During the day, we had gone to school. Maura would feed and change Penny. At night, Brynna came home and became Penny’s mom. Everything she had needed to know about child-rearing she had learned from some parenting book with a really long title.
“I can teach myself to do anything.” She had told me proudly one night as she expertly swaddled Penny, who was crying hysterically despite being fed, changed, and cuddled. “See? I saw this in that book. It really does work!”
Penny had stopped crying almost immediately after she was wrapped tightly in the blanket.
“You're so smart, Brynna!” I had told her with the pride and admiration that is ever present in younger siblings.
Our mother poked her head in frequently. But when she found Penny asleep or content with Brynna, she would slink back into her bedroom and drink herself to sleep or into a stupor.
I could understand Mom's grief, even then. Her feelings had never changed towards Elijah or me. But her maternal feelings towards Brynna were broken, irreparably, and towards Penny, they were never formed. She had observed her growing belly with sadness in her eyes, as though the expansion was a malignant stomach tumor, not a child. Her rages and fits of tears had forced my father to lock her in their room. After Lucien died, she had taken a long vacation from work that left her feeling restless and ready to return. Working didn’t heal the wounds, but it certainly bandaged them.
 After she got pregnant with Penny so many years later, though, she wanted nothing more than to shut herself away, hiding from the eyes of the world that would see how terribly she regretted ever conceiving her.
I had no reason besides her treatment of my sisters to create such an anger in me. But that reason was enough.
Once, when Penny was three and Brynna was turning twenty, our mother had stumbled into the room. Brynna had come home to visit with Penny, as she did every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Normally, she left before my mom and dad came home from work or their recreational time out. But that night, my mom had returned early. After seeing Brynna, she shook her head, sighed in disgust, and went upstairs.
Brynna ignored Mom completely and continued to show Penny how to write uppercase letters. Maura was in the background, cooking dinner and looking over her shoulder at us every few seconds. I was leaned over my schoolbooks, looking up at Brynna and trying to remember how to spell the word “catastrophe.”
“Are you going to stay awake this time, Brynna?” My mother had slurred at her cruelly after making her grand re-entrance into the room.
“Mom, why are you walking like that?” I had asked her innocently before gasping in horror, “Are you drunk?!”
I had never been aware of her drinking habits before, but watching as she tripped over herself displayed them clearly to me.
“Shh!” She snapped, pointing a trembling finger at me for a second. “Should I sit here and watch? Make sure you don't kill another one of my kids?”
I didn't understand. I started to cry.
“Mom, stop!” I begged as I wiped at my eyes.
“Mrs. Olivier, you need to go back to your room.” Maura had told her. Even after twenty-two years, Maura had insisted on calling her “Mrs. Olivier.” Maura was even a few years older than my mom, and yet she still called her by our last name. That had always confused me.
“Don't tell me what I need to do! I need to protect my little girl!” She had run her hands sloppily down the back of my hair and leaned down to kiss the top of my head. “You shouldn't be alone with her, honey. She killed your brother! She killed him when she fell asleep! So selfish! My little boy!” She broke down into a drunken fit of hysterics so shameful, I'm surprised Brynna didn't slap her. “I don't care what happened to you! I don't care if it was ten men...”
“Just stumble away now, Mother.”
Brynna had only just begun to call our mom “Mother.”
“My Lucien is dead! Everyone knew…” She sniffed and breathed heavily, “Everyone knew he was my favorite! He was my baby! I miss him. Every year, I’ve thought that it will get better. But I still miss him so much.” She raised her voice to a vicious shout. “It should have been you! I wouldn't have cared at all, Brynna Claire!”
I couldn't understand how she could say such terrible things. I was in the dark as to what she was alluding to when she had said “ten men.” But there was little interpretation needed to understand the implications of the other words she was saying. I didn't want Brynna to die, especially after losing Lucien years earlier. So, I put my face in my hands and cried harder.
“Take your homework into the living room, darling,” Maura closed my books and packed them into my bag, “Brynn will be in to help you in just a second.”
“I will, Vi. Go on.” Brynna had agreed with a small, reassuring smile.
She was distracted instantly when my mother reached out and grabbed both of Penny's tiny hands. Brynna's eyes flashed with a rage we had all become very familiar with over the years.
“Get off of her!” She barked so loudly that I had to cover my ears.
Upon seeing the terrifyingly furious look on Brynna’s face, Mom had released her grip on Penny.
“You wouldn't even be here if he had lived!” Mom slurred in Penny’s face as tears fell freely from her eyes. “I wouldn't have bothered with you! I wouldn't have wanted you! I didn’t want you! Your daddy...” She said the word with such awful contempt, “Made me have you! He wanted another son like Lucien! You wouldn't even be here if your brother hadn't died!”
Penny was more afraid of that outburst than I was. I suddenly understood that my mother wasn't herself. When Maura engaged in the same reckless imbibing, I understood the same. But Penny had no idea. Remembering it, I felt a harsh pang of pity for her.
Brynna understood it perfectly, too. She didn't excuse my mother's childish behavior or Maura's, be it alcohol-induced or not. She didn't hold with excusing the cruelty of two fully grown, supposedly mature women.
At my mother's words, she allowed herself to snap. Her human frailty overcame her ability to suppress every last flicker of emotion that crossed her heart. Tears leaked from my eyes as I remembered the look on her face as she brought her hand back. Then, without hesitation, she slammed it hard across my mother's face. The look was not one of malicious, revenge-seeking fury; it was one of deep heartbreak and fear.
The moment Mom hit the ground, Maura grabbed Brynna and pushed her away before she could engage in any more violent behavior that would drive my mother to have her committed or worse. But Brynna pushed past her and pulled our frail, sobbing mother off of the ground. I had cried harder when I had seen the blood streaming down Mom’s face.
“You say whatever shit you want to me, but if you say something like that to her again, I will break your neck! Do you understand me?!”
“Brynna!” Maura had screamed at her as she reached out and tried to pull her away from Mom again. Brynna shook her off easily.
“You're the devil!” My mother had shrieked in rage as Brynna pulled her onto her feet by putting one of Mom's arms around her neck. “Satan! You're possessed! I should let your father kill you!”
“Alright...” Brynna had replied as she walked Mom out the room delicately. “Just be quiet and hold onto me. Maura, she will need some ice. Could you bring her some?”
Why had that memory crept up on me? Why had it been so clear? I was attempting to remain level-headed and emotionless for Penny's sake and even partly for Elijah's. Yet there I was, crying right along with my little sister. The cruelty of my mother in that reminiscence remedied my grief, at the very least. But my grief evaporating had left an empty hole that was filled only with a toxic hatred that I knew Brynna had been carrying for well over twelve years.
I hated all three of them for her sake. Elijah had accused me of still being so young. But the sudden loathing of my parents and Maura was proof that I was growing up far more quickly than even I could have imagined.
I had seen them as being nothing short of God-like before. Now, I was beginning to understand that my three parental figures resided at the other end of the theological spectrum. Perhaps they weren't at the very end, but they certainly were close. Brynna, whom I had begun to demonize after overhearing Maura, Dad, and Mom doing it for so long, was working her way back to the top.
I hated that one day Penny would have to experience that same upheaval of every belief she ever held on the people she loved.
Hopefully, if we were lucky, she would forget them. She would never grow to hate them, because they would simply disappear.
After all of this time, I know that wish has been granted. Believe me when I say that it brings me no joy.

Brynna

I was becoming more and more frantic, though those in my party never knew of my internal storm. The forest around us held a presence that we could not see. Besides the years of events that those old trees had seen, some other conversation was occurring between them. I felt unsafe suddenly and certainly not alone. There was something moving amongst those woods, watching us.
Whatever that unknown, malevolent force was could have claimed my brother and sisters. I would scarcely be aware, even with enhanced instincts and all-knowing perception.
I stopped walking and sat on the ground, leaning forward to put my face against my knees.
Just breathe, my mind urged as my heart pounded, Just keep breathing, Brynna.
“Alright…” James was kneeling in front of me and rubbing my arms, “Baby, we’re going to find them. I promise you, we’ll come across them any minute now.”
The eyes of Alice and Quinn were turned away from us. I could afford one fleeting moment of weakness while they looked off in the distance for any signs of movement. I flung my arms around James’s middle and pressed my cheek to his strong chest. His arms wrapped around my neck, and his lips pressed to my forehead.
“It’s okay. They’re not looking, sweetheart.” He told me softly when I went to pull away. With that reassurance, I grabbed a hold of him again even more tightly than I had before. “You’re allowed to be afraid, Brynn. I know that you don’t think you are, but anyone would be afraid right now. I’m afraid, and I’ve only known them for a few weeks.”
I shook my head. I trusted James’s judgment and appreciated his acceptance of my temporary descent into emotional madness, but I would not allow myself to succumb to the raging war of feeling. I had to remain clear-headed and ready to fight. He believed that my show of emotion was normal, but I disagreed. It was not something I had ever allowed in myself before. It was an inconvenience we could not afford.
I pulled away from him, letting him grasp my hands so he could pull me to my feet. I swayed slightly as dizziness twirled my brain in hastened circles. I grasped him to steady myself, and my brows furrowed as I squeezed his biceps.
“You are totally lifting weights!” I accused him with a large smile that was very uncharacteristic of me, “You were thin before. You certainly did not have these…” I squeezed his muscles again. “Believe me, I would have noticed. Despite my aversion to emphasizing physical attractiveness when searching for a mate, I do still look.”
“So you were checking me out?”
The anxiety brewing in my chest calmed as my smile grew. I balled up my fist and hit him lightly in the chest as his arm wrapped around my shoulders. He chuckled softly, a sound that filled my ears with that glow I was so used to by then.
“I don’t know what exactly is happening to me. But I like it.” He said, “Did I tell you I picked up a rock the size of a Volvo and moved it the other day?”
“You did not!” 
“I did. You think I’m kidding, but I am being completely serious. It’s not like I’m eating a lot, either. I don’t know where this is coming from, but I definitely like it.”
“Do you think it’s the mutation?”
“I know it is. What else could it be?”
“Well, I love it. I thought you were quite good-looking when we first met. Though, if I am being honest, you were very thin.”
“I was. I hadn’t been feeling too well after I had that dream. Food repulsed me, to put it lightly.”
“Well, the fate of our kind was rested on your scrawny shoulders. You will be forgiven for not wanting to eat.”
“Okay, I wasn’t scrawny!” He protested.
“You were. You looked slightly ill, if I am still being frank.”
“When have you ever not been frank?”
“There were times. But now, I see no use in holding back honesty to spare feelings. It was something that developed as I aged, I suppose. It was part of my strange maturity.”
“Your maturity is very strange. It’s also the reason why I can easily justify having a relationship with you when you’re still so young.”
“Well, I am an adult, by the old world standards.”
“I know. But you’re also so mature. Can I ask you, though, why someone who looks like you would want to be with a guy my age? I’ve been curious about it, but I haven’t asked.”
“What do you mean ‘someone who looks like me?’ Looking at the context of the sentence, I can tell that it’s a compliment, but…”
“It is a compliment. You said you never had a lot of ‘suitors,’ and I don’t really understand why.”
“Elijah told you. I scared them away by being who I am.”
“Well, you don’t scare me.”
“Despite my best efforts. You know that I certainly tried to scare you away.”
“I know you did. But I was never afraid of you. I knew, and still do know, that beneath all of that disdain and animosity, you have a good heart. You have a great heart, actually.”
“And beneath all of your apathy and arrogance, you have the kindest heart I have seen. I have never been able to trust someone the way I trust you. Keep that in mind, if ever I start to pull away. In fact, remind me that I said that.”
He kissed me and replied, “I will.”
Apparently, a crushingly dense forest is a proper setting for heavy emotional discussions. Alice and Quinn were walking ahead of us, muttering to each other quietly so James and I could not hear. Their body language conveyed their tension and anger. It would not dissipate any time soon.
“It’s just a young person thing. In his heart, he knows he’s wrong. They’re reluctant to admit that their relationship has to last forever. That’s not true, of course. They can separate any time they want,” James explained as we studied them, “But that will be harder than it would have been, if the world was still right. She’s his last link to home and vice-versa.”
“You seem to feel that I have some emotional investment in their relationship.”
“I know you don’t. But you looked curious.”
“I was curious as to why she does not just punch him. That is what she wants to do.”
“Would you punch me?”
“If you were making me that angry, then yes.”
“You would not.”
I smiled up at him and kissed his cheek.
“You are right. I would use my words to punch you.”
“That would probably be worse.”
“Indeed, it would be.”
Alice and Quinn had disappeared into the brush up ahead.
“That is very odd…” I whispered in awe at what was in front of me.
James and I were looking up at a wall of thick palm leaves and pine needles. Interspersed with them were the crumbling leaves of the various trees that surrounded us. It was a huge green behemoth standing before us, blocking out the late afternoon sun. There was something threatening about its great mass. The feeling of being so small in the shadow of something so gargantuan was overpowering. I had to turn away for a moment.
When I turned back, I found James looking up towards the canopy overhead. The wall of shrubbery reached up to the very top of the tallest nearby tree.
“It’s blocking something. Alice! Quinn! Are you there?”
“Guys,” Alice’s voice said tremulously, “You have to see this!”
“How did you two get through there?”
“It parted for us. It was so weird!” Quinn called back.
“Well, I am just thrilled that they are so very special that…” I was beginning to mutter irritably as I walked up to the wall. But as I spoke, the leaves pulled back and up, revealing a small, oval-shaped tunnel. James and I looked at each other, our faces contorted into expressions of shock and amazement.
“That was quite impressive.” I told him as I stepped inside cautiously. I looked back, my eyes widening slightly as a new worrisome thought passed through my mind. “You don’t think this is going to close on us, do you?”
“No.” James replied, laughing. But his smile faded as he added, “At least, I don’t think so. I’ll go first. Scoot over.”
I moved to the side of the tunnel, grasping the twisted branches that made up its walls. He moved inside and maneuvered around me so that he was in front. I turned and grasped his hand as we walked through.
The walls never even shuddered in desire to close on us. We stepped out into the soft orange twilight once we had reached the end.
But it was not even close to sunset. Both James and I were dumbfounded by the sudden darkness of the world. We saw Alice and Quinn staring off, wide-eyed, into the distance, and we looked.
Of all the sights I had seen, it was by far the most breathtaking.
The sky over the metropolis was dark purple, like an oil painting made from the juice of smashed wild-berries. Interspersing with the vivid darkness were flecks of burnt orange swirled spectacularly into the canvas. The clouds hanging lazily against the backdrop were a deep hazel, though those cumulus beings stacked on top of one another were nearly transparent.
The city itself was alight with silver; the towering buildings and their surrounding subjects were made of soft chrome. The lights burning away in their windows were as orange as the light over our heads. It was natural translucence, so unlike the harsh, white, artificial lights we had used back home. Though I could feel the city bustling with life, not a sound reached us. The Pangaeans were quiet folk, in no rush and with no need of the excessive, deafening noises that we were so used to hearing.
It was the only city on Pangaea, or so I thought at the time. It was where its more forward-thinking, progressive citizens lived. I wanted nothing more than to run down the steep, high-grassed slope on which we were standing and disappear into the depths of the fantastic place that stood before me. I wanted to see every part of it. I wanted to experience the life of the Pangaeans.
But they were hostile to us. Surely, we would be killed.
I could understand it now. We were on their land, fresh from the planet we had so dirtied and inevitably destroyed with our filth and greed. We were a plague on those people whose age-old planet was as clean and pure as the day it had been born from empty space and a Godly hand.
Purissimus. That’s what the man had called it. Pure.
I understood why they hated us. We had shunned the creation gifted to us so many thousands of years earlier. The Pangaeans feared that our kind would do to their Purissimus what we had done to our Earth.
I understood it perfectly. I sympathized greatly. I almost hated us for being there, too, until I remembered that we had no other choice. My self-interest powerfully overruled my empathy. It certainly was not the first time that had happened. It certainly would not be the last.
“We have to go down there!” Alice exclaimed, and I could hear that she was beaming brightly with excitement.
“No.” I replied simply before turning my eyes away from the city to squash the temptation.
“Come on, the wall parted for us. They want us to come down there.” Alice informed us, and I suppressed a derisive chuckle unsuccessfully. I always found it so difficult not to correct people when they were so obviously wrong. In this case, I did not even try to stop myself.
“Yes. So they can kill us.” I said, “Darling, you must start using your instincts. They’ve been gifted to you for a reason. Embrace a little cynicism.”
“That seems to have worked out well for you so far.” She replied coldly.
“It has saved me and everyone I have ever held dearly to me. So yes, it has, as you say, ‘worked out.’” 
I said all of that without skipping a beat. I could have used my gift of reading minds to bring up some darkness from her history. But the dark memory I could see through a thin haze in her mind was fresh. It had only just been burned into permanence. Her mother’s crumpled body was at the forefront of her thoughts. Apparently, her trustworthy nature had allowed her to be fooled into letting in a Scout. That’s what I called them: Scouts.
“I’m going down there. There are a lot of people. I can feel them. I’ll just blend in. They look just like us.” Alice told us, but Quinn grabbed her hand.
“You can’t, Alice.”
“Maybe we should go down there.”
James shocked me by spewing such empty-headed nonsense. I had been beginning to feel that he was on par with me, intelligence-wise. Part of intelligence was a firm hold on common sense. To go down into that city filled with natives would be suicide. Suicide defied common sense.
My face conveyed all of that before I could even open my mouth.
“Baby, we could reach out to them. They might look at us coming down there as a noble act, like we’re bravely extending them the olive branch. That could make them listen. You know it could.”
“Or they will rip us apart on sight. That is perhaps a predication far too extreme to be plausible. But I know that it is certainly a possible outcome. In fact, it is far more probable than them granting us an audience with whomever their leader is so we can explain ourselves, James.”
“What if it’s the only way?” He asked me.
“What on Earth, or Pangaea, in this case, I suppose…” I shook my head slightly, pondering the drastic change in a simple expression. I almost lost my train of thought, which most certainly was not new to me. With so many thoughts running wildly through my head before the change-over, I had always been apt to lose what I had been musing on silently. Now, I had the thoughts of others with which to contend. In that case, I found my way back to the point with little effort.
“What makes you think that this is the only way?”
“Because it seems so obvious.” He laughed slightly in disbelief that I was not grasping the genius behind his great plan. He failed to realize that if a plan truly was one of great intelligence, I would have thought of it first.
“James, do not force me to go into a lengthy, intricate tirade. I am becoming more and more exhausted as this day progresses. All of this running is draining my strength.”
“This could be exactly what we need to do. Maybe we’re meant to make peace with them, do you know what I mean?”
“Of course I know what you mean, James. That was not a difficult thought to decipher. However, I think you are wrong. You did not see what they did to people. It was brutal. It was sick. I certainly do not want to be ripped apart!”
“I will never let that happen, Brynna. I promise.” He changed courses immediately, “Alright, I have an idea.”
“Dear Lord…” I sighed heavily and sat down on the ground. He knelt in front of me.
“I’ll go down there alone. I’ll tell them that I need to come back to get you…”
“Let me stop you right there. If you go down there and then say that you need to leave immediately to fetch me, they are going to suspect that you are a spy. That would be any person’s first thought when the enemy strolls so willingly into their midst. Even a brain-dead, crack-addicted vagabond would suspect that.”
He covered his face, trying to hide the fact that he was laughing. I raised one eyebrow in irritation as I looked at him.
“Do you find me humorous, James? Because you should know that amusing you is just about the last bullet on my list of priorities.”
“I find you very humorous, baby. I know that you’re being serious, and I appreciate that. But sometimes, the things you say just make me laugh.”
“Yeah? The scrawny body you possessed on Earth made me laugh, but I did not call your attention to it.”
He laughed even harder now. I wanted to slap him.
“What do you want me to say?” I snapped at him angrily, “Do you want me to say that I am worried about you? Is this plan you are proposing some roundabout path to get me to say that I care?”
“No. Baby, stop it.” He grasped my hands, “You’re getting defensive.”
“You’re being stupid.”
“I know. I know.” He kissed my hands, “I’m sorry. You’re just funny sometimes.”
I studied him for a moment as he tried to suppress his crooked grin that I loved so much. I found myself fighting a smile. I was irritated, surely, but his amusement at what I had said did touch me.
“Well, I am glad you feel that way, honestly.” I told him as my shaken nerves calmed. “Not many people find me to be even slightly funny, so this is a plus, I suppose.” I looked at him, feeling myself choking back words that I wanted to say. But those particular words were forceful, and after several seconds of attempting to suppress them, they had to be spoken. Finally, they spewed forth from me as my defenses crumpled before him.
“I need you, James.”
Those particular words were always waiting to be said. There was never a moment when they were not true.
“I know,” He leaned in to kiss my lips tenderly, “I know, Brynna.”
“I have never needed another human being. I never needed a parental figure, even. But I need you. I hate it, but I do.”
“Why do you hate it?” He asked me.
“I do not hate it because of you. I hate it because I cannot stand allowing myself to rely on someone. I hate knowing that at any time, I could be…” I searched for the right term, “I could be damaged by you.”
His warm brown eyes gazed into mine for a long time. He was stone-serious now.
“I can’t promise you that I won’t hurt you, Brynna, but I will try my best not to.” He told me gently after resting both of his hands on my face. “I know that this is all very new to you. I know that it is something you’re learning.”
“Splendid. You know that you are my guinea pig. That eliminates awkwardness, surely.”
He smiled.
“That is definitely new. I've seen you use your disdain for people to avoid feeling things. I’ve never seen you make a joke to do it. That’s far more normal than anything I could have expected of you.”
“Well, I am not going to apologize for embracing a little normalcy, however unconsciously I embraced it.”
“I’m not asking you to. See? I made you angry. You’re getting defensive with everything I say.”
“You did make me angry. I can admit that to you. I am so used to feeling mild annoyance. But you are making me genuinely angry with your empty-headed suggestions. I have always been independent, and if something happened to you down there, I would survive. But James, I would grieve for you.”
The words being said aloud shocked him as much as they shocked me.
“I would be so sad.” I felt a rush of tears in my eyes. Furiously, I blinked them away but they were bullheaded, with a will of their own. In an abrupt motion, I flung my hand up in his direction, palm facing outward.
“Don’t look at me!”
Respectfully, he looked away. My own will to suppress the new insurgence of tears surpassed their own power; they never fell.
“Maybe you are right.” I told him in a voice devoid of any emotion. Whatever onslaught of feeling that had passed over me had dissipated, leaving no trace of its sudden grip. “Maybe this is our only way to reach out to them, to make them understand. But I have seen what they can do.”
He was looking back at me now.
“If they decide they want you dead, even with all of this power we have now, you would not stand a chance in a crowd of them. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I don’t agree, but I do understand.”
“Either way, it is not a risk I am willing to take. I am not willing to risk your life, not for anything. Okay?”
He nodded and pulled me close to him, kissing the top of my head after my arms had tightened around his middle.
“Okay.”
***

The hunt had to stop as night descended on us. We slunk back through the wall that opened for us again and set up camp in a clearing about a mile away. Alice rambled on excitedly, actually believing that I was listening. But in the firelight, I watched James as he studied the boxes of rations. In his mind that I could not see, he was speculating on how to give equal portions to the four of us while still preserving enough food to last. He was worried that when we found Elijah, Penny, and Violet that they would be starving and thirsty, and we would have no food or water to give them. We had to have enough for them, too.
Our supplies were wearing thin. At least the tent and sleeping bag were holding up.
That was the other dilemma: we had one sleeping bag. The night was growing colder as a huge, bright moon rose over us. I would have been disgusted, honestly, if we all had to sleep right next to each other in order to keep warm. But I would gladly oblige that request if it meant all of us would survive the night. I found Quinn and Alice to be slightly aggravating with their constant bickering and their never-absent urges to chat, but I certainly did not wish death on them.
Alice and Quinn. Their youth should have been infectious. I should have adapted to their normalcy. Instead, I felt nothing but the familiar cold in my heart. I felt neither desire nor ability to behave the way they did.
James was capable of entertaining them. Besides his sagely wisdom, he also had a fantastic sense of humor that shifted with every person he met, according to what he or she found amusing. Earlier that night, I had watched Alice and Quinn laugh hysterically at something he had said. They had forgotten their animosity towards one another for a moment as they listened to his rambling, clearly quite entertaining story. In their amusement, I saw what was expected of me. I was supposed to be like them. Even after the world had ended and we faced new, far more dangerous threats on Pangaea, I was supposed to laugh as I pulled the wool over my eyes.
I could not hold with such imprudence. I knew that for sure. What I did not know was if my will to remain so firmly grounded in reality was a blessing or a curse, if it was right or wrong. I truly did care to know which was the truth, by whomever's standards I should value.
I needed to pull away from James. He was too close. He had breached the battle-worn walls of my innermost defenses, and I needed to get away before they crumpled, never to be rebuilt again. I was in the palm of his hand.
Somewhere on that vast, seemingly endless planet, Maura was shaking her head in disappointment at me. Perhaps she was even cruelly smiling, waiting in breathless, sadistic anticipation for the moment he closed his fist and crushed me.
Or maybe she was worrying herself over it. But I doubted that was true.
I would not allow myself to be destroyed by a man. I was far too strong for that. I would not allow myself to love or even hold fond feelings for him. I had sworn never to engage in sexual activities with anyone. The vulnerability those acts required made me so sick, I truly could have vomited just by pondering the implications of such weakness for too long. I would not be seen as weak. My protection of myself and my pride were far more powerful than my need for James.
But no, all of those insidious thoughts were losing their life force inside of my crowded mind. I watched him worrying over the food we had left. I studied the creases in his face that were outlined by the shadows cast by the flames. I had never seen such a handsome man. I had never met one with such a gentle heart. Yes, he was acid-tongued, dishonest, and angry at his worst. But at his best, he took my breath away with his compassion. I had no reason to fear him.
Ironically, the voice now reasoning on James’s behalf was not my own; it was my mother’s.
Evil witch. Drunken, cold-hearted shrew. I got rid of her by calling her names. I would not allow myself to hear her voice, not even when the sound soothed me, despite all logic.
I had looked away from him, my expression souring into one that betrayed great pain. I shook it away, allowing my impassiveness to resume its place on the front lines of my appearance.
When my eyes moved back to where James had been sitting, he was gone. My heart gave a leap of protest at no longer being able to see him. Then, the warmth in me resumed when I felt his hands rubbing my shoulders.
“Were you listening to me, baby?”
I shook my head.
“I apologize. What did you say?”
“I said that you need to eat something. You’re starting to look sick.”
I shook my head again.
“You think I cannot read your face?” I replied softly, “I might not have full access to your thoughts just yet, but I know of your worry.”
“You know, you sound like you’re from the medieval age when you talk sometimes.” He told me as he laid down on his side behind me. I leaned back against him, took his arm, and pulled it over my shoulder so I could grasp his hand in both of mine. “Not in inflection, just in word choice.
“You sound like you dropped out of middle school when you talk sometimes.” I shot back at him, once again, without missing a beat. “Not in inflection, just in word choice, otherwise known as diction.”
“You’re a dope.” He told me.
“I’m a dope?” I frowned in joking offense. “You’re a dick.”
He laughed uproariously and kissed my hand.
“Was that a slanderous term, Ms. Olivier?”
“Maybe it was. That felt strangely liberating. It crept up on me, yes. But perhaps I should utilize our language’s most profane terms a little more often.”
“You are so weird.” He told me as he rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “But I love it. You know I do.”
“I do know. If you did not love it, you certainly would not put up with me. Of course, I would never change myself to fit your likes and dislikes. You know that as well as I do.”
“I’d never ask you to change yourself for me. I know you’d never ask me to change anything about myself, either.”
“You are correct about that. If I expect that courtesy, I will bestow it onto others. That is one of our greatest kindnesses, isn’t it? To accept one another even if it is, as they say, with warts and all?”
“I have no warts.”
“Nor do I. Wow, I cannot believe that you successfully distracted me from a serious topic I posed.”
“It’s magic. It’s skill.” He yawned and said, “It’s magical skill.”
I laughed again, covering my mouth to stifle the sound. He had laid his head down on his arm and closed his eyes.
“It is, indeed. Do not go to sleep, because we are discussing it now.” I informed him, and he opened his eyes but did not raise his head. “Thank you. You will not distract me any longer, nor will you drop out of consciousness before this conversation has been had. We are running low on food, are we not?”
“We are. So you’ll have mine. I’ll survive.”
I looked back at him, scowling darkly. His tone had been resolute; he would not accept any other suggestion or negotiation on the matter. Well, that is what he thought, anyway.
“You will not starve yourself for my sake. They are my siblings. If they need food, then they will have mine. You should not and are not expected to starve for them. I, on the other hand, would have it no other way.”
“I know. You put their interests far above your own, always. Why is that?”
“I asked you kindly not to distract me, you evilly manipulative man. I cannot believe how easily you are able to do that.” I cut off the discussion about my sacrificial tendencies in regards to Penny, Elijah, and Violet before it began. I wanted to tell him everything there was to know about my past. But I was not ready for that, and I would not push myself to reach that point.
“Your stomach is grumbling.” I informed him.
“I have all of this new muscle to eat through. You look like you’re two steps from a rehabilitation clinic.”
“Isn't that funny? There was a rehabilitation clinic right by my building. Too bad we are not on Earth anymore. I would not have to walk far, and if I escaped, I would be able to quickly disappear into my apartment and lock the door before they found me.”
“I remember you telling me about that clinic being so close to your apartment. You kindly directed me there when you thought I was trying to abduct you.”
“Technically, you did abduct me. But in this case, your criminal behavior saved my life.” I looked back at him again. “I hate to think about what would have happened if you had not been there that night. I see it all the time, you know. When I do finally sleep. I see many awful things, actually.”
I had seen beastly hands ripping into my abdomen and pulling out its contents. The two Reapers were eating me while my heart still pumped oxygen to my brain, allowing it to function well enough for me to process my predicament. I felt every excruciating moment of my death. I had seen the Earth burning, people screaming, dying, or worse, living. I had lived through the hearts and minds of those who had lost children, parents, husbands, wives, spouses. It was easy yet painful, moving through the collective unconscious of those who had survived. It never failed to leave me, after a tumultuous night of sleep, feeling raw and irreparably damaged.
All-Knowings, or Athenes, as we are officially called, are known universally by another name, Sanssommeil, or, loosely translated, The Sleepless.  
“Come here.” James told me softly, and I leaned over to him. His lips grazed mine gently before pressing to them for a long, glowing moment. “You don’t ever have to worry about that, okay?”
 I nodded.
Above all things, James wanted me to feel safe. I had never detailed the grimmer aspects of my life to him, but somehow, he already seemed to know them. At least, he knew their ghastly effects on me as a person. His efforts to make me feel secure worked perfectly. I had never felt as safe as I did when I was with him. There was still a part of my brain that urged me to pull away. But slowly, that part began to silence itself as it faded to nothing. I stood and waved goodbye to that inclination cheerfully but with a certain reluctance to accept its departure. I needed my cynicism and iciness to survive, didn’t I?
That woman ruined you. My mother had told me once, and when I looked up at her, shocked that she had spoken to me, I had seen that her eyes were fixated on Maura. When I asked her what she had said, she pretended that she had not spoken. Maybe she hadn’t.
“What are you thinking about? You look like you're in pain.” James told me, and I knew that though he tried to pass off what he had said as a joke, he was also slightly concerned.
“Nothing. Just thinking. I go off to strange places sometimes, but I always find my way back.” I explained quickly. I looked at him, and a smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. “I might be worried about having those two people I just met snuggled up against me while we sleep tonight. Picturing that would certainly provoke a look of agony to appear on my face.”
“Do you really think I would put you in such an uncomfortable position? Even though now, I'm definitely tempted because the look on your face would be priceless. Seriously, I'm in need of a good laugh.”
“Why don't you put me into that uncomfortable situation and observe the events that follow? Do you want to sleep alone with two teenagers, or do you want to sleep with me?”
“Now, are we talking about sleeping with you in the literal sense or...”
I shot him a scathing look over my shoulder. The effectiveness of that glare was hindered by the smile that had taken its place on my lips again.
“The evil stare, coupled with a grin she is trying to suppress. What do I make of this? Is she amused at my joke, or is she is trying to set me aflame?” He narrowed his eyes as he studied me. “I guess I should tell her that I compromised with those people, whose names are Alice and Quinn. They're going to sleep in the tent, but we’re going to get the sleeping bag. If we’re all still together tomorrow, then we’ll switch. Does that make you happy?”
“Consider me elated, honey.”
“Oh, elated... I've done well.”
Later, I watched as he unrolled the sleeping bag on the flattest part of the dirt. We crawled into it, the small space forcing me deep into his arms. I would not have wanted to be anywhere else, anyway. He locked his arms around me, and I was warmed wonderfully by the heat from his body.
“I’m going to stay up and keep watch. But you need to sleep, Brynn.”
All lighthearted joking and teasing had dissipated between us. Now, we were gravely serious.
“I don’t want to sleep. I told you that I have those awful dreams, James.”
He kissed my forehead.
“Don’t you remember what I told you on the ship when you took that pill?” He whispered after I had looked up at him. The kiss he planted on my lips sent that delightful shock-wave through my body.  “I’ll watch over you, baby. I’ll wake you up. Right now, you have to sleep.”
I was so warm and snug there in the sleeping bag with him. Every part of me was drained from the day of walking and worrying. My body was seduced into sleep by the heaviness of my eyelids.
“We’ll figure this all out tomorrow.” He assured me gently, “We won't stop until we find them, I promise.”
I nodded, believing him. I needed to believe him. I could not picture Elijah, Penny, or Violet being hurt. I could not stand the image that forced itself to the front of my dozing mind: I saw them crawling on the ground, searching for food as their lives drained slowly and painfully like water from a bucket stuck through the bottom with a nail.
My Penny… If there was one person for whom I could admit that I felt actual love, it was her. I loved that little girl. I prayed to the faceless deities or the one God to keep them all safe, but I prayed for Penny above all else. Her childish mind was as pure and good as the planet on which we were currently residing. I feared the destruction of such purity. I would fight the mutilation of her innocence with the same malicious violence that the Pangaean people had used to fight us.
I wished someone had fought so viciously for me.
James’s heart was beating steadily in his chest, lulling me further into that blissful sleep. I grasped him tighter, drawing in his intoxicating scent. I wanted to stay there with him forever and forget every unspeakably horrific thing that had happened.
“You love him.” My mother’s voice told me, and I could hear the faint gleam of a smile in her words.
Shut up, Mother.

Quinn

We laid staring up at the tent above our heads. She was as far away from me as the space we were lying in would allow. I didn’t look at her. She didn’t look at me. Neither one of us said a word.
What the hell was my problem? There was no reason for my anger. I knew how pointless it was. I knew I was wrong. But of course, I couldn’t admit that out loud. I couldn’t allow myself to realize that our problems had nothing to do with her newly found craving for human flesh. She was my last reminder of home, and I was hers. That was a link I never thought could be shattered. In truth, it was that “unbreakable” link that was tearing us apart.
Who was Alice? She was my girlfriend of two years, and I loved her as much as seventeen-year-old boys can love their girlfriends, which, of course, is more than anyone else is capable of. But our final days on Earth had been the worst of our lives, to say the least. Our parents’ deaths had occurred in those days. We had been fleeing the great explosion. There had been so much uncertainty. Through that uncertainty, fear was born. I associated her with those unpleasant feelings because she had been with me as those awful events unfolded. She was a constant reminder of what we had seen, and what we had seen were sights that no one, especially not two seventeen-year-old kids, should ever have to see.
“I wish I could understand why you’re so mad, Quinn.” She said to me suddenly. The random break in the uncomfortable silence triggered irritation in me that was unwarranted. I should have known that she would want to talk about our problems. In fact, I should have wanted to talk about them, too.
My unwillingness to discuss our issues led to another question: Did I really want them to be fixed?
“Are you just going to ignore me?” She pushed.
“Yeah.” I answered shortly.
“Why?” Her voice was trembling with the threat of tears, “Quinn, I did what I had to do. Why can’t you understand that? Would you have wanted me to let myself get killed just so I wouldn’t kill someone else?”
I didn’t respond. I had made it very clear what I would have wanted her to do. I had so much to say but lacked the energy or the motivation to discuss and resolve the tension between us.
“I don’t understand you!” She exclaimed, and now, she was crying. “I never would have seen you differently. If you had killed those things, I wouldn’t have cared.”
“I know you wouldn’t have. And I told you that you could have just knocked them out.”
“I tried. They were so fast. They’re tough. It takes a lot to knock them out. They’re not like those guards, who were only human. The natives are monsters, Quinn. They're worse than those things that took my mom and dad, even.”
“I’m not going to apologize for wanting to find other ways around things. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting to kill people. I don’t want to mutate into whatever you’re mutating into. You’ve forgotten everything that you’ve ever believed in.” Just as I had begun to believe that I wouldn’t be telling her a thing, I was letting it all flow out like toxic, volcanic ash. “You were the one that told Elijah not to go into the ship after Brynna and start shooting people. You were the one on Earth who was always talking about God and how we should live a Christian life. Do you remember any of that? Or has whatever freakish thing that’s taking over you made you forget?”
She put her face in her hands and cried harder. I was being unnecessarily cruel and unforgivably immature. I didn’t realize that at the time. We never realize just how awful we can be when we’re fighting with people we love. In fact, it’s those we love who receive the worst of our rage. They feel our innermost darkness because we inflict it on them more willingly than we would on strangers.
“Maybe you’re not even you. For all I know, you’ve been taken over the same way that your parents were. Maybe that’s a sign, that it was your parents and not mine who got possessed by those things. Maybe you were always…” I searched for the right word before settling on one that was far and beyond anything I should have said, “Maybe you've been evil this whole time.”
“I’m evil because I defended myself? I had to kill both of my parents. I did it because they were stuck somewhere terrible, Quinn! If you knew what I had seen and what I had felt, you would never throw that in my face! If you knew how fast and strong those two natives were and how strongly I had known that they were going to kill me, then you wouldn’t care that I had killed them first. I didn’t want to get ripped apart! I didn’t want to die! I might have been the religious one on Earth, but you were the logical one. Or…” She realized how dumb that sounded, and tried to rephrase it unsuccessfully. “You were the one who… I don’t know! You were the one who believed in Darwin and all of that ‘survival of the fittest’ stuff. Weren’t you?” I didn’t answer, “Weren’t you?!”
“Yeah, I was. That has nothing to do with this.”
“Yes, it does! Remember when we used to argue about God and evolution?”
For a minute, I remembered those heated debates we had gotten into so many times. We had always been so interested in the things we learned in school, which was odd, considering that other kids our age didn’t care in the slightest. We used to debate and discuss all the interesting things we had read or been taught by our teachers. The arguing was never malicious; it was just spirited.
“You always used to say that as humans evolved, they adapted. You always used to go back to Darwin and ‘survival of the fittest.’ Isn’t that what’s happening to us?”
Maybe we couldn’t fully support Darwin’s theories as the reason for why we were changing, but it was certainly something to lean on. She was right, and I was so very wrong.
I still couldn’t admit it.
“We’re changing to adapt to a new world. There are threats here that we couldn’t face if we were just human.”
“So why are we the only ones who are doing it, then?” I demanded as I stabbed blindly at her arguments, just to cut them down and prove that I was right.
“There are other people who are doing it! James and Brynna are evolving! You’re not getting on their case about it!”
“Because they’re not my responsibility!”
“I’m not your responsibility, either!” She snapped at me as angry tears still streamed down her face. “I can take care of myself!”
“Well, you’re going to prove that now, because I’m not watching your back anymore! I don’t care about you anymore! If you want to embrace whatever this is, then fine. But I won’t! I don’t want to evolve, or whatever you want to call it! I want to be normal!”
“Well, newsflash, little boy, it’s happening whether you like it or not! And it doesn’t just come down to science! It’s God’s will, too!”
“You have a lot of nerve talking about God and His will, don’t you? Isn’t the number one rule in His little book not to kill people?!”
“Will you stop harping on that?! When will you understand that I had no choice?!”
“You’ve made stupid choices before. You let that thing into your house, and if I hadn’t shown up, you would be dead right now!”
“It talked to me in my mother’s voice! It appeared to me as her! I didn’t know! And in case you’ve forgotten, I was the one who shot it! So, don’t tell me I would have been screwed if you hadn’t come along!”
“I’m glad that you’re so happy that you shot your parents, Alice!”
“How can you say that?! I am not happy about it!”
We were fully screaming at each other by that point and not caring if James and Brynna heard.
“How could you ever say that I’m happy about it?! I had no choice then, either! They were suffering!”
“You don’t even know that for sure…”
“Believe me, I do! And just because you didn’t kill your own parents doesn’t mean that you didn’t kill them! You left! You had one after you, too!”
“Yeah, it was your dad!”
“It wasn’t my dad!”
“Well, your mom was outside of your house and the only other creature we know of was your dad! So yeah, it was him!”
“That wasn’t his fault, if it was him, but it wasn’t him! We’re both responsible for what happened to our parents! Something was after us, and we ran from it! We didn’t realize that we were running, but we were! So they possessed my parents to get close to us! And somehow, they’re all dead now. Nothing else matters except that they're dead now, Quinn! Somehow, through some chain of events, they’re dead!”
“You don’t need to question the chain of events! We know how it happened! And it was your fault! If you hadn’t called me that night, I would have been there to stop that thing before it killed them! My mom and dad were outside of my door! They had been trying to hide me from it! And I wasn’t even there!”
“That’s your own fault! That has nothing to do with me!”
“What part of, 'If you hadn’t called me,’ didn’t you understand?!”
“So what, you’re mad that you saved me?”
“Yeah, I am. Because you know what, if I could go back in time, I would have saved them! I should have saved them over you!”
The words brought such a sting that she was rendered silent. I wanted to cover my mouth after they came tumbling out. I wanted to take it back. But she jumped up and stormed out of the tent. After stomping past Brynna and James, who were still awake, she disappeared into the trees.
“This is none of our concern.” Brynna told James.
“We can’t let her go storming off into the woods at night by herself.” James reasoned with her.
“Sure we can.” Brynna replied airily. To prove it, she laid down and closed her eyes. “She will be back when she has had her tantrum. I would be angered substantially by such harsh, brutal words as well. A person stalking after me as I sought a quiet place to be angry would be the last thing I would want.”
“Just leave her! She can handle herself out there! She’s proven that, hasn’t she?!” I snapped at both of them as I zipped up the tent.
“I’ll go get her if you don’t.” James said to Brynna.
“James, I sincerely doubt that you can handle the tumultuous emotions of an eighteen-year-old girl.”
“But you can. Please, will you go get her before she gets hurt?”
I was sure that him gently prodding her into doing the right thing was a common occurrence in their relationship. If there was one person who knew how complicated women could be, it was James. I wanted to talk to him like I had earlier. Even though he had dragged me into that conversation about Alice, I had felt slightly less angry after it was over. I doubted that Brynna could comfort Alice, but I knew that James could talk me down.
But I didn’t want to be talked down. I was right. No one would tell me otherwise.
“Fine.” Brynna sighed heavily.
In my fury, I had pulled the zipper of the tent roughly but still hadn’t closed the flap all the way. Through the open space I saw her roll on top of him and lean down to kiss him quickly as he laid beneath her.
“Be safe. Holler if you need me.”
“I’ve got this. I can handle myself quite efficiently, Mr. Maxwell.”
“I know you can.” He reached up and moved her hair away from her face. “But just in case, right?”
She kissed him again and crawled out of the sleeping bag. He watched her walk off into the darkness of the trees that surrounded our clearing.
“You’re wrong!” James called back to me from outside.
“I am not!”
I heard him chuckle softly to himself.
“Ah, the arrogance of youth.”
“Your little girlfriend is like, three years older than me. So, I’m sure you see the arrogance of youth a lot.”
“I don’t, actually. Have a good night, Quinn.”
I knew that he wasn’t going to sleep because Brynna was out in the woods. He wouldn’t allow his guard to drop until she was safely back with him. I should have felt the same protectiveness over Alice. But my feelings for her were evaporating quickly. I never could have foreseen such a change in our relationship. I had thought naively that we would be together forever. Now, I knew that the chances of that actually happening were almost nonexistent.
I knew exactly what my parents had known all along. Though it hadn’t been different college choices, different life goals, or even outside hatred of interracial relationships that had torn us apart, we had still been torn apart. They had always known it would happen though they had never known that it would happen exactly the way it had.
Well, if you’re listening, I thought, I want you to know that you were right. You never could have known that we would end up here. But you did know that in the end, I wouldn’t love her anymore. So you were right. I just want you to know that.
I sensed that in some far off place unknown to the living, my parents felt no joy in response to my admittance of failure or even in my acknowledgment of their wisdom that had been so spot-on. It felt almost as though we had their approval finally, but that it made no difference now.
I felt that if they could change the course of events, they would not have spared themselves. They would have held Alice and me together. We needed each other now, they believed. We were all we had.
I turned over on my side and closed my eyes, shutting out those beliefs I knew to be factual. I forced myself to view them as just rambling speculations.
But in the deepest part of my heart, I knew that they were communicating with me somehow. When I was at the point right before I dropped off to sleep, I sometimes heard them, but that night, just before I shut out their transparent voices, I heard one last thing spoken by my father:
“…before it’s too late.”

Violet

Maura’s face tumbled around in my mind as I slept. The usual warmth that accompanied seeing her was absent, as though it had never existed to begin with. Now, all I felt was a rolling nausea as I thought about her abandonment; she had chosen our father, who would never love her, over us, who always would.
Brynna would call it desperation. They had been young when they were in love. In fact, Maura, in her drunken state, once admitted to Brynna that he was the only man she had ever loved. I knew that wasn’t true. Maura had been married once before, to my father’s best friend, who was the kindest, gentlest, most generous man I had ever known. I remembered him so fondly as bringing us presents and telling us stories about his trips overseas. While power had corrupted my father, it had never corrupted Michael. How Maura couldn’t love him was beyond my realm of understanding.
Maura lusted after my father with no shame. Long after he was married to my mother, she still carried a torch for him. It wasn’t a low-burning flame about to snuff out with one strong wind. It was a full-fledged inferno. I was beginning to see my father and Maura the way Brynna always had.
Perhaps that was unwise, to feel as Brynna felt. I knew that through all the hatred and disdain, there was a tiny hurt inside of her that was the direct result of the way everything had played out. I had never been on the receiving end of Maura’s bitterness, but Brynna certainly had.
Admitting that I was fascinated by my sister’s odd personality was easy. I spent plenty of time musing on it. I understood now that I was older exactly what had bred such animosity. Admitting that I pitied her, even slightly, was a hard pill to swallow. Brynna needed no one’s pity, and if she knew she had mine, it would infuriate her.
Penny was so easy to understand because she was young. Elijah was complicated in his own right, but since he had escaped much of the emotional storm by shutting himself in his room, he fared better than Brynna. Her distrust and her anger were spun around endlessly in her always moving mind. The way she spoke and the way she embraced such iciness were her defense mechanisms.
I hadn’t understood that before. It took feeling the harsh sting of Maura’s abandonment for me to understand. I couldn’t imagine the feeling amplified three-fold; Maura, my mother, and my father had all cut off their love for Brynna at the same time. I couldn’t imagine that kind of pain.
I decided that if I saw her again, I would give her and James my blessing. If she was able to trust him, then I absolutely should have been able to, as well. Of course, I had heard some stories about him from the other survivors that were not complimentary. But if I asked about the allegations that were made, I was sure that he’d be more than willing to explain himself.
I knew they had found their way back to each other, the same way I knew a lot of things. I just knew.
He made her happy. I saw her smile and laugh genuinely for the first time in so many years. When I was around, she tried to hide her happiness, but I could always see it. If there was one thing she couldn’t keep hidden, it was the joy she felt when she was with James. She deserved that, especially after what had happened with Lucien.
Elijah would see it differently. He would never approve of James. He would insist that in the end, James would only end up hurting her. She deserved sure, never-ending happiness. No gambling would be acceptable. It had to be sure.
I awoke from my sleep to see a shape looming over me. My heart skipped a beat, and I opened my mouth to scream, only to find that the sound had been cut off as though someone was grasping my throat. My hand flew up to touch my neck; I didn't feel a hand wrapped around it.
“It’s me!” A familiar voice whispered, and my fear calmed upon hearing it. I closed my eyes and reached up to touch his face; touching his distinct facial features was the only way I could be sure that what my hands felt matched the mental image I had of him and the voice that had spoken.
Nick.
“It’s gone mad back at camp! I ran in here after you because it’s not safe there anymore!”
“How did you find us?” I whispered after sitting up. “We’ve been looking for Brynna all day and haven’t been able to find her.”
“Remember when I told you that you smelled good? Well, somehow, I was able to follow your scent! I smelled it the minute I walked into the woods!”
“That’s crazy!” I whispered, “Can you smell Brynna?”
“I’ve never met her. I don’t know what she smells like.”
“Oh.”
“Are you alright? Have you seen those people in here?”
“Not yet.” I shook my head even though he couldn't see me. “But I know they’re around. Can’t you feel them?”
“Yes. It’s like they’re all around us but I can’t see them, you know?”
“I know.” I replied as I looked around into the endless darkness. The moon had moved further away from us, taking its natural lighting along. We wouldn’t be able to see until morning. For all we knew, the reason we could feel the natives lurking in the trees was because they actually were surrounding us. They could have attacked at any minute, and we’d have had no time to prepare.
“It’s dangerous to be sleeping out here in the open.” Nick warned me delicately. It was as though he had read my thoughts. “They can see in the dark.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, they didn’t come to the campsite until later tonight. Your father made us put out our fires. It was the stupidest thing we could have done because we couldn’t see them. The moon was too far away to give us any light.”
“So, they just attacked you in the dark?”
“Yeah, and they didn’t miss the people they were going after. They went right to them. They didn’t need any light to see, so they can see in the dark. That's what I think, anyway. There isn't another explanation for how they could see.”
I shuddered and pulled my dirt-covered sweater around me. The days were mild, but the nights were freezing-cold on Pangaea.
“Did they only take ten?”
“No. Tonight, they took twenty. After they were gone, there was this huge fight. Your dad was trying to keep people calm but he only made it worse. People don’t trust him anymore. Not all people, anyway. The group is splitting up tomorrow.”
“Where are they going?”
“I don’t know. They don’t know, either. They’re just going, I think. They’re just getting out of the open.”
“Don’t the natives know that we have nowhere else to go? We can’t go back to Earth. It’s gone.”
“I know,” Nick replied, “Trust me, I’d love to go home now.”
“Remember the other day when we were talking about Germany?”
“Yeah.” I could hear him smiling.
“I always said that if I went to Europe, I wanted to see Paris, Rome, and London. But I definitely would add Germany to the list.”
“You’d love it. I know I did.” There was a long pause before he spoke the words that we both were thinking. “The last days on Earth were so chaotic that we didn't think this through completely. All we thought about was surviving another day. We just wanted to still be standing after everything was over. Even during all of that, though, I really did think that coming to another planet would be great. But I’d give anything to go home now.”
I was thankful for the darkness because tears began to leak from my eyes. I swallowed hard before taking a deep breath. I didn’t expect Nick to comfort me. I wouldn’t even put him into the position where he felt like he had to embrace me or offer me kind words of reassurance. So when I spoke, I made sure that my voice was steady.
“Me too.”
“I upset you.”
What the hell?
“I can see you.” He explained.
“You can see in the dark, too?”
“Yes. Try it. Just focus on it. Tell yourself that you need to be able to see.”
I closed my eyes and tried. Sure enough, when I opened them, I could see. It was like peering through a lens when the camera was set to night vision. The only difference was that details were not glossed over. In fact, they were crystal clear.
“Weird, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“The natives can see in the dark and now we can, too.” I looked up at him, “That is really weird. Do you think we’re turning into them?”
I watched him look off, his face contorted into an expression of great concern. He had been contemplating that, too. I expected him to lie in order to spare my feelings. I didn’t think that he would want to worry me. But instead, he opted for honesty.
“I think so. I think it’s in the air here. We’re becoming Pangaean.”
“I don’t want to be Pangaean.”
“Neither do I. I read so many American comic books as a kid. X-Men, Green Lantern… You know what I’m talking about, ja?”
I nodded. I had been friends with a couple of guys whose whole lives revolved around raiding comic book stores for “hidden treasures,” as they called them. They were the biggest nerds that I had ever met, but they were also my very best friends. I had enjoyed our excursions to the store, our rambling excitement that was shared so willingly with the workers, and our hours spent reading silently within the safe confines of my indoor patio.
“You’re way too cool to be a girl.” One of them had told me.
I had laughed in response.
“You just haven't met any cool girls yet.”
I was smiling slightly at those memories. I remembered so vividly the colors of the pictures and the intricate stories. I had been a nerd. Miranda always made fun of me for it. Even though she was smart, she was a Justin Bieber fan who spent hours painting her nails and styling her hair. We had been so different. After existing for so long within the confines of high school, though, I believed that we were exactly the same.
My smile faded as a suffocating realization took hold of me: All of those people were dead. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. But every last one of my friends was gone. The finality of it took my breath away, leaving my grasping my chest as I struggled to draw in an unchallenged breath.
Nick was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't notice the sudden change in my mood.
“I read all of those things and thought it would be so cool to have powers. Sometimes, especially in X-Men, they wanted to be normal. I didn’t understand it. How could you want to be normal when you were special, right? But now, I do understand. We’re changing over into what the natives are, and I’d give anything to go back. Go back to Earth, go back to just being human.”
Hearing him talk had lulled me back into calmness. His voice and his words were so delicate, though I'm sure that sounds strange. The content of what he was saying was a welcome distraction, too.
“Comfort in normalcy.” I wiped at my eyes, wondering if I had muttered that phrase to him or in response to my internal musings about him. To avoid that heavy mental conversation, I addressed what he had said. “I feel the same way. I keep asking myself what I would have done if I knew everything I know now and Brynna came to me, telling me we had to leave the earth. I don’t know if I would have gone.”
“I think you would have. I know I would have. I wouldn’t have wanted to die. I’ll take having powers and being hunted by natives over dying. Even if we’re running from them, at least we’re still alive to run, you know?”
I did know. It was an almost paradoxical statement, and yet I totally understood what he was saying. I agreed wholeheartedly.
“We’ll find your sister, Violet. I found you.”
I nodded again and leaned into him. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and we stayed clasped together, protecting each other from the cold of the night and our own regrets and fears. When dawn broke, my eyes switched over to normal. I scanned the trees around us, seeing no one hiding amongst the fading darkness. Penny awoke a few minutes after the light began to descend on us. Elijah snored away, and I let him; he needed to sleep.
“Hi, Nick,” Penny greeted him with a wide smile, “Look, I lost a tooth!” She pointed into her mouth proudly.
“Oh, look at that!” Nick replied as he bent down to observe the gap. “Did you leave it under your pillow for the...”
I gestured to him madly behind Penny's back, mouthing, “No! No!” But Penny was smart enough to have already picked up exactly what Nick was about to say.
“Vi told me that the tooth fairy doesn’t live on Pangaea. She says that maybe there’s a different fairy that brings other stuff. I didn’t get anything. So I think she’s wrong. But it’s okay because I haven’t seen any stores. So I don’t think that I need money. And what other stuff could I get besides toys? I really wanted this singing thing I saw in the store back home...”
And away she went… Penny rambled to Nick enthusiastically about everything from her lost tooth to the way Elijah passed gas in his sleep. Nick was cracking up through that particular conversation. I turned my head away, trying not to show how hard I was laughing, too. Elijah would be mortified to learn that Penny shared that information with a semi-stranger so freely, and that made it all the funnier.
“And we’re looking for Brynna. We need to wake up Elijah so we can find her. I still haven’t told her about my tooth! Well, I haven’t told her because I haven’t seen her. But when we find her, Violet says she’s going to be so excited! I think she will be, too. Hang on a second, okay?”
She walked over to Elijah and shook him with both hands.
“Wake up, Eli! We have to go find Brynna.”
Elijah sat up abruptly, almost smacking into her head with his own. Luckily, she dodged out of the way in a blur of movement. Nick looked back at me, eyes and mouth opened wide in shock. I nodded and shrugged.
“Her, too?” He whispered to me.
I nodded again and suppressed a smile.
“What’s going on?” Elijah asked groggily as he looked around. His eyes stopped on Nick. 
“Hey, man. How the hell did you find us?”
“Hey. It's a long story.” Nick replied, “How’s your digestion?”
I snorted through my nose as I tried not to laugh. But the hilarity overtook me; I leaned forward to rest my face against my legs and giggled uncontrollably.
“What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. I just hope it’s all going well.”
Elijah looked between us in confusion. Then, he shook his head.
“I’m not even going to ask. Seriously, though, how did you find us?”
“I must have memorized Violet’s scent. I followed it until I found you.”
“So you’re mutating too, then?” Elijah said.
“I guess so. Where is your nanny? What was her name?”
“Maura.” Elijah and I answered grimly.
“She stayed behind.” I answered. I didn’t want to divulge the full details. I didn’t want to hear a person voice my own disgust at Maura’s choice. To hear it spoken out loud by a third party observer would do more harm than good. Sure, I’d like to hear Maura being torn down as a broken, pathetic woman who abandoned her surrogate children for a man who didn't love her. But it wouldn't lessen the sting of her leaving us. Bashing her out loud would only upset Penny.
Nick didn’t ask questions. Instead, we all just started walking. Penny was munching on some dried fruit loudly behind me, reminding me of my own hunger. I looked down as my stomach gave a mighty rumble. I would feed her above myself, always. Elijah would skip his meals for me. We were used to sacrificing things for each other but those sacrifices had never involved food. We had always had more than enough at home, what with Maura demanding that our chef make us portions large enough to feed bodybuilders training for the Olympics.
“All you have to do is look west just a little bit, and you’ll see people who don’t have money to eat. If your parents can afford to feed you this much, then you should eat this much.” She would say as we shoveled in those generous helpings of rich, delicious foods. I tried not to remember the tangy tomato sauce on the homemade pasta or the huge pieces of fried chicken that when bitten into, yielded only juicy white meat. As I chewed a hard piece of dried pear, I tried not to remember the sweet berry cobbler that our chef always made us in the summertime…
“Oh my God, I’m torturing myself…” I muttered to Nick as he walked beside me.
“How is that?”
“I’m remembering all the food we used to eat at home. I told you about my parents' jobs. They had money, and they were never at home. Maura cooked once in a while, but we also had a chef. She made us so much food, we ran out of room in our stomachs.”
“What kind of food?”
“Nick!” I laughed, and my stomach growled painfully. “I’m not going to torture you, too!”
“Why not? Misery loves company, doesn’t it?” He asked with a smile.
“Maybe so. But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to torment you with my vivid memories of homemade pizza with oozing cheese, bloody steaks and huge baked potatoes with sour cream and butter melting inside…” I sighed longingly and leaned against him, grasping his arm in both hands.
“This is torturing me. You’re right.” He told me with a soft, forced laugh.
“Do you know what I would give for…” 
I was so stunned by what was before me that I halted my sentence, never to resume it again. We had walked under a log and pushed through some hanging vines to come upon that sight. Nick and I stared, wide-eyed and mouths agape. I think we might have even been drooling.
Before us was a large grass hut. The smell of cooking meat wafted over us, sending us into an intoxicated stupor. On a table fashioned from the remnants of an old, huge, chopped-down tree, there were cooked vegetables; fluffy mashed potatoes, steamed greens of an unknown origin, mushrooms tossed in some sauce that appeared to be butter, and huge pieces of what appeared to be purplish-blue broccoli were right there, ours for the taking. On another trunk-table, there were huge pieces of meat, cut open in the center to reveal their peeling, juicy, red centers. Even from where I was standing, I could see that there was not a scrap of fat on those succulent cuts. I could smell freshwater, too, and when I looked, I saw a stream running quietly behind the hut.
“I don’t even know what to say.” I blurted out as I stared, unblinking, at the feast that was before us.
Nick just shook his head. I looked over at him to see that he was diverting his gaze to the trees above or around us. Every time he tried to look away, though, his eyes snapped back to the still-steaming food. His conscience was trying to force him away from the buffet that wasn’t ours, but his senses were overpowered by the grandiosity of it. His aching hunger was too much to bear in the presence of such divine food.
“Why are we hesitating?” He whispered before turning his gaze away to meet my eyes.
“I don’t know,” I giggled almost maniacally, “Let’s eat it!”
“No!” He grabbed my arm when I went to walk forward, “We’re starving, ja? So, why are we hesitating?”
“Because we know that this technically isn’t our food. But whoever is in that cabin won’t mind if we take some. Come on, we’re two starving kids. They won’t care.”
“Stop!” He grabbed my arm to stop me from entering the clearing and grabbing a huge piece of meat off of the pure-white bone. “It’s the instincts, Violet! They’re telling us not to eat it! And it’s a native in that cabin! They’re probably waiting for us to start eating their food. Then they’re going to come out and attack us!”
“God, I’ll knock on the door if it’s such a big deal.”
“Everything is quiet! Listen!” He exclaimed in a loud whisper as he looked all around again. I looked up, too, expecting to be able to call him a paranoid moron before shoving off to stuff my face. But he was right; the bird-like creatures that tweeted and sang in hypnotic consistency were silent. The trees were no longer rustling in the soft wind. In fact, the wind had stopped completely. It was as though we had fallen into some alternate space where some onlooker could pause the setting at will.
I could acknowledge that some unknown danger was brewing, or I could allow my hunger to drive me further into the clearing where I would drop down on my knees in front of those tree trunk tables and start eating every bit of that fantastic smelling food until it was gone.
“I’m so hungry, Nick…” 
I struggled to grasp common sense. I struggled to remain in the brush. I knew that if I took a step, something would happen. There was a large chance that I would step out into the clearing and be ambushed by natives. But there was still that small chance that I could walk out and watch the food multiply to the same plentiful portions as what I was used to from home. It was such a small chance, but it still existed…
My instincts were not dissuading me from believing that it was true…
I took a step and was immediately plunged into darkness.
“Violet!” Nick yelled behind me, but his voice echoed around in my ears like some distant, annoying thought I was trying to suppress. The food and the cabin were still in front of my eyes. I knew that the sudden night was not normal, but for all I knew, it was just another Pangaean oddity. I ran to the trunk table and knelt in front, grabbing a huge handful of that steaming, sweating meat. It broke off with no fight, tumbling from the bone gracefully. With no finesse needed as I had no one to impress, I took a monstrous bite and actually growled in feral joy. The moment the meat hit my stomach, I could have stopped eating as I felt a comfortable fullness. But instead, I ripped even further into the handful I held, desperate for a permanent end to that agonizing hunger.
The door of the grass hut creaked open so loudly that I dropped the meat to cover my ears. I looked up to see a swirling, breathing darkness in the open space. I stared at it, remembering nightmares where I was staring into a dark abyss similar to that one, wishing I could pry my eyes away before some ghastly apparition appeared to me, scarring its hideous face onto my protesting retinas, never to be erased. I couldn’t look away; I strained my eyes trying, but they held steadfastly to the darkness.
From within it, I heard a raspy breathing.
I struggled to stand, wanting to run as quickly as my newly-mutated body would allow. I begged whatever was holding me still to release its iron grip. I begged my eyes to look away.
They poured out of the grass hut like ants furiously escaping their smashed colony. They crawled across the ground at a speed that would make the natives turn and run. Somehow, even as I drew quick, desperate breaths, I felt the meat in my hand turn to soft, dripping mush. I looked down to find that the bowl was filled with trailing pieces of flesh mixed with blood of such a deep red that it burned my eyes.
In a horror beyond anything ever experienced by man or woman, I screamed as tears poured from my eyes. Every last one of those hideous creatures stopped running. They stared at me with unblinking, white eyes. The slashes in their faces that were their mouths opened and closed the way a fish gasps as it flails on a ship’s deck. It was silent, so unflinchingly silent that my ears rang with the same high-pitched squealing that came before the blast that had destroyed the earth...
In an eruption of sound that shook the very dirt beneath my feet, my scream was sent back to me, toppling me backwards, crippling my body. It was being spewed back by those unholy creatures that wanted to rip me apart and consume the shreds of my body…
My mind remained fully functioning as ten of them jumped on top of me, their claw-like fingers scratching me wherever they could find bare flesh. I screamed in pain, awaiting the moment they ripped into my body and ended my life.
A flash of light caught my furiously moving eyes.
There was a guttural scream of rage that filled my ears. All the creatures looked in one sweeping movement. There were three more roars that almost spoke in affirmation to the first, and two more bright lights appeared in front of my burning eyes. Through the haze, I saw the outline of three human beings. Were they Pangaean? Were they humans? Was it Brynna, James, Nick, and Elijah? I couldn’t know for sure, but I prayed that whoever they were, they would save me. I prayed for life, just a few more seconds of it, at least. I was so young. I didn’t want to die…
A crack of lightning erupted overhead, catching onto the lights carried by those four rapidly moving, viciously fighting shadows. Those shadows thrust their arms forward, pushing the lightning that had struck them into the bodies of the creatures. In a blur, they all begin to retreat, forgetting how desperately they wanted to devour me. As the lights wielded by those mysterious shapes hit the creatures, they immediately began to convulse before crumpling to the ground in a pile of dust the color of soot. I watched, eyes wide as the monsters still on top of me jerked back and forth, spewing disgusting red froth before erupting in a display of fleshy fireworks or crumbling into that black ash. I coughed as some of the latter flew up my nose. Immediately, my body jerked forward in a series of powerful sneezes.
One of the shapes dropped down beside me. The light of day was returning even as I faded into the darkness of death.
“You stay with me! Violet, you keep your eyes open!” Her scream was one I had never heard before. In it, I heard desperation and fear so strong that they were capable, it seemed, of taking her life. “Keep her back! Eli, hold her back!
“VIOLET!” Penny's high-pitched, terrified shriek rattled my eardrums.
“Do not close your eyes!” Brynna was holding my face, screaming just as loudly. She shook me wildly for a minute. “Stay awake, do you hear me?! Violet!”
My eyes had closed, but I hadn't realized it. When I snapped them open, I saw the same fear I heard in her voice displayed unabashedly on her face.
“Brynn?” I looked up at her, gasping as the pain from being clawed so many times took hold suddenly. “Brynna?”
“Alright, we don’t have a choice anymore…”
James’s voice.
He was scooping me up in his strong, protective arms, bringing me more comfort than I ever could have imagined would be brought to me by him. But I was still gasping and sputtering blood, wails of agony erupting from me loudly enough to shake the trees. The wind whipped my already horribly pained face as James darted through the woods. I was reaching out for Brynna, screaming her name even as every breath inflicted even more pain on me. As she ran with the same inhuman speed beside him, she reached out and took my searching hand.
The last thing I saw was a towering green wall parting to reveal a circular tunnel.

Brynna

I had never run so fast before. No amount of Reapers or those Scouts that had attacked Violet could bring forth such speed in me. I felt no fear besides one. I felt no fear besides perhaps the greatest fear of all: Violet was going to die.
I smelled her blood seeping from those penetrating cuts the claws of those things had made. Why had she eaten that food? Why had she fallen for their so obviously transparent ruse? I had failed her. I had stolen all knowledge from our gene pool and left her with a festering emptiness that should have been full to the brim with common sense. I hadn’t imparted my distrust of all things. I thought I had been doing her a service by allowing her to remain naïve and trusting. I had failed her.
I might not have forced her to see the worlds as being fraught with danger, but I would not allow her to die for that inability to see. I would drag her back to life even if the effort killed me. I would empty every precious breath I had left into her dying lungs and jump-start her fading heart with the beats of my own. I would sell my soul. I would beg. No amount of shame was too high a price.
The natives in the lone city parted like the sea at Moses’s hands when James and I came barreling through. We sped by so quickly that I did not see their faces. Were they molded into the sneer of the animals within as their defenses sprang to life, urging them to attack? Or were they merely curious? I did not know, nor did I care.
I could hear her heart’s steady beats spacing out to a rhythm too dangerously slow. She was quiet. Her sudden silence drove my panic to reach a startling new level. 
We stopped running once we reached an intersection. Blurs of light and sound whizzed by at the same vicious speed that we reached while running. The moving objects zoomed up a hill of asphalt and disappeared into the horizon between rows of gargantuan buildings.
A young girl with glowing purple eyes the color of the sky overhead stopped in front of us. Her mother had been clutching her hand tightly, but she had twisted free from her grip. She looked to be about Penny’s age.
Penny. I had left her with Elijah, Quinn, Alice, and whoever that boy was who had been with Violet when that awful event had occurred.
Why had he not stopped her? I would make my displeasure known on my next meeting with him. I would call him a coward for not accompanying her into that dark clearing.
The trees were parted overhead, and the Pangaean sun was glowing in the sky. Yet when we entered that space to fight those things, there had been only blackness and a crescent moon the color of blood.
If Violet died, I would kill that boy. I would destroy him with the animal fury I felt burning in a toxic wave of destruction within my chest.
“Adam.” The little girl had approached us without fear. She pointed to the towering palace that glinted in the fiery orange light of the clouds. “Adam.”
“Do not speak to the dark ones, Adina.” Her mother warned before reaching her hand out to draw the girl back to her. With an easy leap, the girl jumped onto her mother’s back to be carried off. Her arm was not attached to her mother’s body; she was still pointing to the palace.
James and I needed no more instruction. We were running again.
The palace was surrounded by a gate fashioned from the moaning trees in the forest. Their edges had been sharpened to points. Eight guards stood wearing airy silver armor that was bordered with the sharp spikes of some creature I did not know. The long sleeves of their uniform were made of the same material.
“We need to see Adam,” I gasped out, “We need to see him now! My sister is dying! Please let us in!”
“No inside.” A guard boomed through lips that barely formed his brutally loud words, “No…”
He stopped talking, and in the distance, I heard a whispering that raised the hair on my arms. The guards parted to the right and left in perfect unison, leaving a space for us to get through. The large wooden gate swung open. Ahead, I saw the door of the palace open simultaneously.
The interior of the man's home was as intricately designed as the paintings in French chapels. Murals that told stories I could not possibly have known were painted all along the walls. Ahead of us was a staircase that rose up at a sharp angle out of sight. In front of the staircase stood the man who had appeared that night at camp. That event seemed like it had passed so many years before the moment in which we found ourselves currently.
“Please, will you help her?” I asked immediately, forgoing a polite greeting in favor of immediate beseeching. “There were these creatures in the woods…”
“Shadows.” He answered the question I had not posed out loud. As he spoke, his eyes locked on James's. “They have returned.”
“Sure,” I nodded vigorously, “She’s bleeding, and she’s dying. I can hear her heartbeat, but I can hear it stopping. I can feel...” I was rambling in my panic, not realizing that I was divulging far too much information, “I can feel her life draining. Please help her. Please, I’ll do anything!”
“She was tempted by them. She succumbed to their seduction.”
“She was hungry. She was looking for me, and she hadn’t eaten in days…”
“It does not matter.”
“Yes, it does matter!” I screamed in desperate fury, “She’s only seventeen! She was acting exactly as most would at her age! She is young, and too trusting, and stupid! Please, we need your help!”
Violet’s breaths were ragged, interrupted only by soft moans of pain. The scratches were beginning to ooze a green liquid. The sight almost sent my hands flying to my mouth as an urge to vomit seized me.
“You are his offspring. Daniel Olivier.”
“Yes, but he does not speak for us.” The words rolled off my tongue before I fully understood exactly what I was saying. Somehow, I knew that was the right thing to say.
“I can see. You are of old. He is not.”
“This is all irrelevant!” I stomped my foot in frustration, “Do you feel it?! I know you can feel her life leaving her! I am begging you to do something!”
“It takes great courage to come to the dwelling of an enemy.”
What was the point of his inane musings? My sister was dying before his eyes, and yet he wanted to babble on about insignificant details! I could have reached out and slapped him, though I knew I would not live to feel the satisfaction.
“Follow me.”
The man began to ascend the staircase, gliding effortlessly up its steep steps. We were climbing each one carefully, looking back to see the ground floor getting further and further away. As we walked, I looked at James, knowing he felt the same as I did. We were climbing into the lion’s den. It was not clear whether we would ever emerge from its depths again.
We could not worry about that. I would do or say anything to save Violet. Once she was healed, I would claw my way out of that place, utilizing every new skill or enhancement that had overtaken me since landing on Pangaea in the process.
Adam led us to a room with blankets sewn from the skin of animals covering the floor. The walls were startlingly light-colored and blank; we had only seen those detailed pictures covering the walls from floor to ceiling since we had come inside. Adam beckoned to the animal skin rugs and James laid Violet down on them.
“Brynna!” She cried out, her blank eyes darting around in the empty space frantically as she searched for me.
“I am right here, honey,” I grasped her hand in both of mine and rested my forehead against hers, “I am right here with you, and I am not going to leave you.”
Adam had his eyes closed. I should have wanted to shout at him to get on with the life-saving, but I knew that he was calling out to someone. The doors opened only a minute later and a girl around my age walked in, pulling with her by a leash made of vine one of those hissing, snarling creatures. Its almost nonexistent lips curled back to reveal the rows of long, jagged teeth. Its blank, unseeing eyes rolled around disturbingly in the rotting sockets.
“What are you doing?!” James exclaimed in a rage as he jumped up to his feet.
“Do not question me, Protector,” Adam held his hand up to silence him, “You know not of our healing ways. Please ask your woman kindly to step away.”
“I am not going to step…” I started to say.
“I know that you will not do it on your own. You will not do it even if I tell you that remaining where you are will put your life in danger. You are very stubborn, and your love for this girl blinds you to any pain or threat that could befall you. Perhaps if your mate suggests kindly that you move away…”
“Come on, Brynn.” James was lightly grasping my shoulders now and tugging me away from Violet.
“No!” I exclaimed and shook him off.
“Baby, just let them do this.” James urged me gently. I looked at Violet, who was fading before my eyes. I looked at Adam, who I could not possibly trust. But James’s hands on my shoulders kept me grounded. I trusted him, certainly. If he felt that the situation was under control, then I would force myself to believe the same. I let him pull me away.
“Do not bring that thing near her!” I screamed at them as the girl led the creature over to Violet.
Adam held up a tightly wrapped bundle that he began to patiently unroll. Once the fabric had been pulled away, I saw that he was holding a dagger.
“What are you doing?!” I was desperately trying to get to Violet now. I would not let him hurt her. I had brought her there so that she would be saved. Now, he was going to kill her because she was, as he said, my father’s offspring. Or perhaps it was because, as I had said, she had been so very stupid and thus was undeserving of his pity and even her life.
No. I would never allow him to take her life for simply behaving as most her age would have. I would lose my life trying to end his if he tried to take Violet from me.
A look passed between James and Adam. After a short hesitation, James’s hands tightened on me from behind just as the dagger was plunged deep into Violet’s stomach. She let out one long exhale of air before clenching her teeth together tightly. I could not hear the sound she made because the scream that exploded from me bounced off of every blank wall and reverberated around the large room deafeningly. I was sure that she had screamed, too.
“Stop it! Let me go!” I shrieked furiously. I was trying in vain to claw and bite my way out of James’s grasp. I kicked him, swung my fists back to punch him, and sunk my teeth down into his arm three times before he curled his hand around my neck and held my head up against his shoulder. His free arm wrapped around my middle to lock my arms to my sides.
“James, let go!”
Adam moved the dagger into my sister’s stomach, allowing the blood to fully saturate the blade.
“I need a willing sacrifice of blood from one who possesses a heart that beats for her.”
What in the name of all deities and Gods in which I did not believe was that supposed to mean? Just as I acknowledged that I had no clue what he was suggesting, I thrust my arm out, understanding perfectly. He frowned at me in consternation and said curtly:
“I do apologize.”
He cut into my arm with a quick motion that left a deep, spraying cut. I watched in horrified fascination as my blood on the knife’s blade mixed visibly with Violet’s. Our blood was dripping off of the dagger as Adam brandished it above his head, moving on his knees closer to the enraged creature. It snapped its jaws at him, gargling and snarling as it lunged forward.
With the same swiftness, Adam plunged the knife into the waxy, white flesh of its chest. It put up far less of a fight before its death than I had been expecting. Immediately upon being stabbed with the blade doused in my blood and the blood of my sister, it crumpled.
When it hit the ground, it erupted into a blazing, perfectly formed inferno that stood on end. I watched, my eyes wide, as it burned into nonexistence. Adam reached forward into the fire, allowing the flesh on his arm to burn as our blood and the blood of the creature was singed into a hard crust on the blade. Once the blue blaze had snuffed out, he pressed the dagger to each wound on Violet’s body.
James had released my hands, and I was squeezing his arms that were wrapped around my neck. I could feel his forehead pressed against the back of my head as he whispered soft assurances to me that I was finally able to hear.
“I promise you, everything’s going to be alright. I’m not going to let anything happen to her. I promise you, Brynna. I promise.”
The burning of Violet’s skin brought about more pain in me than it did in her. She hardly jumped, though I assumed she had lost consciousness. With each press of the blood-caked blade on her wounds, I could hear her heartbeat growing ever closer to its normal speed. I could hear her lungs clearing as sweet breaths of perfect air filled them to their capacity.
I wanted to cry. But I had believed for years that my tear ducts no longer worked, so the tears I would have shed were forced to drip, unused and unwanted, back into whatever recesses they used as their dwelling inside my body. I turned to James and wrapped my arms around him, my entire body trembling as though I had just reached up to grasp an exposed wire while standing in a puddle. My body tingled with the same uncomfortable shock that I would have received in that case. His lips pressed to the soft skin of my neck twice, gifting me with that warmth that soothed me always. They traveled up to press to my cheek and then my forehead. I closed my eyes and just let him kiss me like that. I needed all the comfort I could get after such a harrowing event.
“She will live.” Adam’s voice snapped me out of whatever daze I had allowed myself to fall into. I turned back to him, still holding both of James’s arms around me as I dropped to my knees beside Violet. I reached out with one trembling hand and stroked her blood-soaked hair.
“I was not entirely sure if she would ascend. But she has, for which you should feel immense gratitude.”
“I do.” 
I looked down at her as she slept peacefully. Her pain was gone. I could allow the calm to wash over me like a cleansing, holy rain, and it did; for several seconds, my eyes blinked slowly as a potent exhaustion settled into me; my lungs suddenly felt lighter than the air that filled them because the constriction in my chest had loosened; and the trembling in my arms and legs was slowing. Only one pressing matter was still at hand. I did not want to address it when I felt such relief, but I knew that it was an unavoidable topic, so I spoke again. “What do I owe you?”
Adam laughed softly, a sound that sent chills down my spine. There was plenty I could give him as payment, but none would be sacrificed willingly. I owed him a debt that I knew he would not let me escape.
“You fear me because of what I have done.”
“That does not answer my question.” I was finished listening to his random observations and ramblings. It was manipulation at its most obvious; he was controlling where the conversation went whether it was relevant to anything I said or not.
“I know that it does not. But I believe that someone with a strong heart such as yours deserves an explanation.”
I could not turn down an explanation, surely. Whether I had a strong heart or not was debatable.
“I sent my people to where yours were dwelling because your kind is not welcome on our Orb.”
“You have to understand that we have nowhere to go anymore.”
“I am aware of the destruction of your Orb. That is precisely why you are unwelcome on ours.”
“So, what?” I asked, looking up at him as my eyes turned red. I was playing with fire now. If he was offended by my anger, he could kill all three of us with a swift movement we would not see coming. I did not underestimate his power, even then. Still, I continued.
“You want us to board our ship again, fly through space, and then plummet into nothing as we all wait to die?”
“No,” He shook his head and tried to suppress a somewhat devious grin unsuccessfully, “I want to harvest the ones who do not belong here and keep the rest.”
“And what exactly is your method for determining who is worthy of their lives and who is not? Besides, it appears to me is that you and your people are just killing at random.”
“We most certainly do not kill at random!”
I had finally made him angry, but I stared him down still, unflinching. I would not be intimidated into backing off of the subject. I wanted to know his reasoning for killing innocent people.
“Brynna, maybe you should stop talking.” James suggested, and I could hear only the tiniest hint of trepidation in his voice. I could also feel in him the desire to fight with Adam, to destroy him if he stepped towards me threateningly. I reached back and grasped his hand, still not tearing my gaze away from the centuries-old man standing before me.
Adam looked taller, thicker, and even more menacing. His eyes glowed with a deep red that rivaled my own. I had infuriated him with the suggestion that he and his people were killing innocent bystanders, abiding by no rhyme or reason. However, he had given me no choice but to believe that was true.
“How well do you know those you saved from the destruction?” He demanded of me.
“There were too many,” I replied calmly, “I do not know a thing about some. With most, I know very little. With some, I know quite a bit.”
“Destroyers, tempters…” He snapped in pure disgust, “Craving all things while giving nothing in return... You know nothing of this?”
“Are you telling me that they were evil people? Even if they were, their deaths were unwarranted. Who are you to judge them?”
“I am not able to judge them as I did not Create them. But I am able to keep them off of my land.”
“So, this is your planet, then? Are you the all-knowing, all-powerful leader? Perhaps you should speak to my father; he could surely take some useful notes from a man of your high standing.”
There was my disdainful condescension rearing its head at the worst time. James sighed and let go of me with one hand to cover his face.
Adam, however, seemed to be softening as his earlier calmness resurfaced. His eyes dissolved back into their strange light green.
“I am almost all-knowing. I am very powerful. But I am simply a vessel. This is all not important. You must understand that those who died did not belong here. If they were not embracing darkness, then they simply were not changing.”
“So you know that we’re changing, then?” James spoke up finally. “Is it because we’re here?”
“It is because your planet is gone. You have lost your home and must now fight to survive. Nothing more. You all must live ages before you’d be worthy of our air.”
“You say you cannot judge because you are not the Creator. Yet here you are, judging us. Have you ever heard of individualism? Perhaps you could brush up on the subject instead of resorting to generalizations. Just because we are all of the same race does not mean that we are all the same.”
I was pushing my luck, I knew. I was expecting and even craving another outburst of proud rage. To my slight disappointment, he only chuckled again.
“You have a fire-tongue. You are changing over nicely.”
“I have always talked like this. Please, do not give your race credit for my oddities.” I was the one getting angry now. The whole conversation was not going at all as I expected. I did not like surprises in either circumstance or discussion.
“Oddities? That is what you have been told? What is your name?”
“Don’t tell…” James started to say.
“Brynna.” I answered proudly.
“Well, Brynna, whoever told you that your ways are oddities is wrong. It was always meant for you to behave this way. Have you sensed things? Have you known things that one cannot possibly know?”
I nodded.
“Welcome to Purissimus.” He smiled now, revealing his straight white teeth. I saw his fangs gleaming in the dim light.
“What about him?” I pointed at James, “Why is he growing muscle at such a rapid rate?”
“Muscle?” Adam furrowed his brows in confusion.
“You know…” I held my arms up and flexed, revealing that I, too, had toned up quite randomly since our arrival, “Muscle.”
“Ah, yes, his size. Females know all. Males know much but are more apt to protect. Of course, females are able to defend themselves quite efficiently. However, males are able to crush a threat with little effort. That is why he is ‘growing muscle,’ as you called it.”
“So all of this is a direct result of us fighting for our lives?” I asked, not knowing when to stop posing questions that were borderline offensive. I was on a roll now; I had to know everything. “You are part of the reason why we are fighting for our lives. So how can you be so calm about us changing into your kind?”
“I am calm about it because it was meant to be. Some were meant to change. Some were meant to die because they cannot or will not. I am pleased that your sister was able to be spared. I hope a long life is in store for each of you.” He nodded to us and turned to go.
“Wait!” I called after him, “What are we supposed to do now?”
“I cannot tell you, though I do know much.” Adam replied easily, “What is that excellent Earthean expression? About cards and what you all call ‘fate’?”
I was drawing a blank, something that was new for me. Then, I realized what he was trying to say and answered his question.
“'Let the cards fall where they may.'”
“Indeed. Such a wise and true philosophy should be kept in mind. Please, remember those words that you just spoke. Great darkness is coming.”
The door out of the room opened slowly. James and I turned around to watch it. When we turned back to question him further, he was gone.
“Well, that was just about the weirdest thing to ever happen.” James told me in a quick show of forced, lighthearted sarcasm. He picked Violet up again and turned to the door. “Let’s go, baby.”
But I was staring where Adam had only just stood, his final words to us tossing around in my mind. Great darkness?
I could feel it as well. The lurking danger was the voice whispering in the trees. It was the creatures that had attacked Violet. It was the Reapers. It was my father.
Together, they created a swirling mass of destruction. The ones in the path of that chaos would feel every last moment of pain. We would be touched by death. How it all was going to begin was irrelevant. What mattered was the fact that the end was nowhere in sight.
War. It was coming. It would consume us in its tornado of catastrophe and pain.
But why? For what reasons would this great conflict arise?
Of all the things I knew, I could not begin to decipher the reason. But I did know that the cards were beginning to fall.

Quinn

As much as I wanted to run into the city after Brynna and James, I couldn’t. My feet just wouldn’t move forward. My new acquaintances would not be welcomed but they also wouldn’t be killed. I knew that if Alice, Elijah, Nick, and I were to follow them, we would not be met with any kindness. In fact, a swift death would be our fate. I didn't know why James and Brynna were special, but I knew that no harm would come to them within the city limits.
We stood waiting for them to return. It wasn’t until nightfall that they came walking back. Immediately, we all jumped up and Elijah ran forward to make sure his sisters were alright. Penny was right behind him, her childish concern evident in her wide eyes.
“Is Violet okay?” She asked Brynna as James laid Violet down on the ground.
“She is just fine, honey.” Brynna assured her softly as she patted Penny’s hair. “Everything is fine.”
“I didn’t know if you all would be coming back…” Elijah told them weakly.
“We’re back.” Brynna was in no mood for forming her usually long and overly detailed sentences. The emotional insanity of the day had run her down.
“What’s it like?” Alice asked eagerly, and I scowled at her. If Brynna wasn’t up for rambling in her weird way, then she certainly wasn’t up for describing the city.
“It’s huge, to say the least.” James answered to spare his girlfriend the task. “There’s a huge castle at the end of it. That’s where their leader lives. That’s where we went.”
“What was he like?” Elijah asked, “Was he the same guy who came into the campsite?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” James replied, but Brynna nodded.
“And he didn’t try to kill you?” Elijah pressed, “I mean, thank God, but it’s a little inconsistent, don't you think?”
“He was slightly bemused by us being there.” Brynna explained dully. “He said something about bravery. Whatever the reason for our prolonged survival, we’re here now, and Violet is alright. I also know that we shouldn’t expect the same kindness again. They do not want us on their land. He made sure that was clear.”
“So why did he save her life? And how did he do it?” Elijah continued to push her, and I could see her patience wearing thin.
“Let the woman breathe for a minute.” I told him before turning to look at Brynna, “You look like you need to sleep.”
“I do. But I cannot. I have to keep an eye on her. She has not woken up yet, and that is worrisome. He said great darkness is coming. I sense it all around us. Can any of you feel it?”
We all looked at each other, shaking our heads.
“Well,” She muttered as she ran her fingers through her hair, “then it’s a cross I must bear by myself, I suppose. I need to talk to my father.”
“What?” Elijah jumped up and looked down at her where she was kneeling. “Brynna, the last time we were there, he…”
“I know what he wanted to do. But we are wandering aimlessly through the woods. If something is coming, then he will be the one who starts it. I need to know what exactly is going on.”
“The group is splitting up.” Nick answered, “Do you remember those other people who walked out with you from the ship?”
“Yes. The other sacrificial lambs.” Brynna replied bitterly.
“Well, there are these two people. They’re married. Their names are Mary and Richard Bachum. Did you ever meet them?” Nick asked her.
I remembered those two. They made an obvious show of their religious devotion by dropping to their knees and praying after both minor and major setbacks. After the first attack, they were downright insufferable. I had always found broad showings of faith to be slightly uncomfortable. That day, they were gesticulating, throwing their hands up to the sky and screaming loudly to the heavens, begging for help. I had wanted to storm over and order them to stop, as they were driving everyone around them even more deeply into paranoia. Instead, Alice and I went for a walk.
“What about them?” I asked, “Their camp was two over from mine and hers.” I beckoned to Alice with a quick jerk of my head.
“Well, they’ve gathered up a huge group of people. They’re heading north. Another guy said that he was getting people together.” Nick continued, “They were heading south.”
“And my father? Which group did he choose?” Elijah asked.
“He was staying behind. He had a group of his own.”
“How very interesting. I was not aware he had a spine.” Brynna said with an apathetic shrug.
“Just because he’s staying behind doesn’t mean that he has a spine. In fact, the only thing that it proves is that he doesn't have a brain.” Elijah spat back. His anger was not at her but at his father’s continued hold of power over weak-minded people. I could definitely agree that Elijah’s ill feelings towards the man were justified, but I didn’t want to know the details. It all seemed too complicated and upsetting. I couldn’t afford to carry anyone's emotional burdens because I had my own weighing me down.
“Yes, and he's not staying at the campsite. They’re moving on, too. I don’t know which direction they’re going. But I do know that these groups are staying away from each other.” Nick added.
“Why?” Alice asked.
“They disagree about where they will find safety. Perhaps there are also slight ideological differences. Am I correct?” Brynna asked.
“I’m not sure, honestly.” Nick replied, “But you’re probably right.”
“Good enough.” Brynna nodded, “Well, we can at least forage through the campsite for food and supplies. Then, we will form a group of our own, I suppose.”
“Maybe it would be better if we joined up with one.” I suggested before adding hastily, “But I definitely don’t want to go with the Bachums. No way.”
“They are out of the question, I agree.” Brynna chimed in.
“Your father’s group is also out of the question.” James added.
“Why are we joining up with a group?” Elijah asked suddenly, “I think we’ll do much better on our own.”
“Yes, because we’re doing so well already.” Alice replied with a roll of her eyes. “Violet just almost died. There are things in these woods that are deadly. Not to mention, we are so close to the natives. I mean, hello?!” Alice pointed to the city in the distance. “That’s their main city, as far as we know. They’re not just going to let us chill here. Safety in numbers, guys. I agree with both of you that we shouldn’t join up with your dad’s group or the Bachums. Even though the Bachums haven’t given us a reason to not trust them...”
“Their blind, naive, gaudy shows of faith are more reason than we need.” Brynna replied firmly. There was no shaking her conviction on anything, but in her objection to the Bachums, she was overly adamant.
“Thank you!” I exclaimed, holding my hands up to the sky. I put them back down immediately after realizing that I was accidentally mimicking the same gesture that I had criticized in those weird people.
“Fine. Whatever.” Alice huffed away with her arms crossed over her chest.
“So, we need to follow the other guy. Do you know his name?” James asked Nick.
“I’m trying to remember. He was very soft-spoken. He was far back in my section of the campsite. We were number five. Oh, I remember now!” Nick snapped his fingers as it came back to him. “Don. Don Abba.”
“Oh, Don!” Elijah exclaimed as he, too, remembered. “Yeah. Weird guy. He’s not weird in a threatening way. He’s just really smart. Really short, though. He said since he came here, a bunch of guys have gained like, fifty pounds in muscle mass, and he feels like he's only gotten shorter and thinner.”
A look passed between James and Brynna. They were trying to hide small smiles. I knew that James had undergone a transformation similar to the first that Elijah had described. They weren’t huge like bodybuilders or anything. But they were certainly toned up. I wished the same thing would happen to me. In James’s presence, I felt weaker and in need of an immediate weight-lifting binge. Of course, given that there were no weights, I would have a hard time catching up to him. It was shameful, considering he was twice my age.
A huge gasp behind us jolted us all out of our discussion. We turned to see Violet sit up suddenly. After drawing in several sharp gasps, she started to swing her arms around wildly; in between those huge breaths, she was screaming.
“It’s okay. It’s alright.” Brynna had run to her and dropped to her knees. She wrapped her arms around Violet’s neck and pulled her close. “They’re gone. You’re alright.”
Violet’s hands flew up to touch her face; she was checking the damage done by those creatures’ claws. But her scratches were long faded, healed by whatever magic the leader of the natives had summoned.
“What were those things?” She asked quietly as tears streamed down her face.
“I don’t know. What were you thinking, eating what was there?” Brynna demanded softly as she grasped both of Violet's hands in her own.
“I was just so hungry! Nick…” Violet looked behind her at Nick, who had walked forward. “I should have listened to you!”
“It was a mistake.” Nick told her gently with a shrug, “Anyone would have…”
“Do not make excuses for her!”
Brynna’s warmth had iced over in a matter of seconds. She was no longer hugging Violet or comforting her. Now, she was chastising her for what was an honest mistake, as Nick suggested.
“It was foolhardy at best. At worst, it was a show of plain, blind stupidity.” Brynna barked at him as she stood up; he flinched and backed up a step, and despite ourselves, James, Elijah, and I laughed softly, prompting Violet to scowl at us. 
“Just so you are aware, you being attacked sent a jolt through my entire body that was like being stabbed right through the heart with an electrified, sulfuric acid-covered machete, and while I do appreciate that without that utter agony, I would not have been able to track you down, I do wish that you would appreciate that I would have preferred never to be in such discomfort. Also, it would be very nice if you would realize how…” She struggled to find a word, “How aggravating it was to see you in such a state! And to know that you had ended up in that state because you were too stupid to recognize paranormal subterfuge! That food was there to lure you in, so that you could become their food! How was that not obvious?! Penny is five, and she would have realized that!”
“Let’s go for a walk.” James told Brynna somewhat firmly.
“No! Of all the stupid courses of action one could take upon seeing unguarded food in the present climate, you took perhaps the most pitiless!”
“I’m sorry, Brynn!” Violet exclaimed through her tears. The genuine remorse in her voice was enough of an acknowledgment to Brynna’s accusations of stupidity. Violet knew that she had been wrong.
“Well, I am sure that you will think twice next time before consuming conveniently placed food, however hungry you may be.”
“I will. Of course I will.” Violet replied, “Please just go easy on me. I paid for it, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I know that you’re angry because I scared you…”
“You angered me by completely disregarding common sense! I would have thought you far more intelligent than this! Consider me more disappointed than angry.”
“Let’s go.” James ordered, but Brynna was already storming off ahead of us, headed back towards the campsite, I assumed.
“She’ll come around.” Alice assured Violet softly as Elijah pulled her to her feet.
“You know how she is. You’re right; you scared her, and she’s angry that she had to feel vulnerable.” Elijah added comfortingly, “It’s not fair of her to act this way after what you’ve been through. But honestly, Violet, what were you thinking?”
“I was hungry.” Violet insisted. She was desperate for someone to understand. “And then there was all this food…”
“It was like it had been set out for us.” Nick added helpfully, “And it smelled so good. Imagine that temptation.”
“Temptation. That sounds about right.” I chimed in with a nod of agreement. “It’s weird, isn’t it? You’re just walking along, and you stumble across that. We’re all inches from starving to death. Then you find food.” I looked at Violet who was wiping at her eyes quickly and sniffling with each new, soft sob that took her. “I would have done the same thing. It doesn’t matter how stupid it was. We’re only human, right?”
“Well, we’re not,” Alice snapped at me, “But that doesn’t mean that we don’t make human mistakes still. Those things…” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and all anger towards me faded as she looked at Violet. “They always tempt us first. They offer us what we want most in the world. I fell for it, too, Violet.”
“Really?” Violet was obviously reassured by the fact that she wasn’t the only one.
Alice nodded.
“It didn’t manage to attack me,” She continued, “But it would have killed me if I had given it a chance. I won’t even tell you exactly what happened after I killed it. I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to.”
“Well, you have to tell me now. You can’t just lead into that and then drop it.” Violet told her in a steady voice. She was calmed down now.
“Sure I can. Maybe another time.”
Alice turned and scowled at me one last time before walking off. I wanted to blurt out the gory details of exactly what had transpired after she had shot the creature. But something stopped me from disclosing the secret she and I had kept so tightly guarded. I wasn’t afraid of what they would think. We hadn't known that those creatures had possessed her parents. We had only known that they were monsters hell-bent on killing us, though we still didn't know why.
The attack on Violet posed the same question. Were they just hungry beasts in need of a meal? They were too patient. The drive to eat would have been too strong to hold off long enough to stalk us for as long as Alice’s mom had. The way they consumed the souls of the living in order to mutate their bodies into that hideous form showed other motivations.
I had heard about Reapers. They also possessed the living in order to fool those they were hunting. As I had heard it, Brynna had been targeted by them. They were fallible, though; in her case, they possessed two younger guys in order to gain her trust. They didn’t know that she would never trust a man, young or old.
“We have a long walk ahead of us.” I told the group as we wandered through the woods. “We need to start thinking of ways to tell if we’re still us.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Elijah asked over his shoulder.
“The Reapers and…” I raised my voice to call ahead of me. “What did you call them, James?”
“What?”
“The other ones. There’s Reapers and…”
“Shadows.” James answered vaguely, “That’s what the leader called them, anyway.”
“Well, the Reapers and the Shadows can appear to us as people we know. They do that so we’ll trust them. If one of us gets possessed by one of them, we won’t know until it’s too late.”
“Introducing such distrust and alarm into the present situation is unwise and quite cruel.” Brynna replied as she strolled along, looking up at the blue sky that was only slightly visible through the thick canopy of the various trees.
“Whatever.” I shook off her random assertion. “You know I’m right, Brynna.”
“Perhaps,” Brynna nodded, “But discussing this now, as we traverse the woods where those creatures dwell is a tad anxiety-provoking, is it not?”
“When else are we going to discuss it?” I questioned her before deciding that the whole argument was useless. I continued, undeterred. “We have to think of questions or something.”
“One question.” Elijah responded.
“What is it?” I asked irritably.
“No. We need to think of one question. It will be less confusing that way.”
“But we didn’t know each other before we came here.” Alice chimed in. “Quinn and I could answer personal questions about our lives before all this, but you all couldn’t. We couldn’t answer anything personal about your lives, either. How are we going to settle on one question?”
“Who was the President of the United States when the event occurred?” James asked, and I knew he was being sarcastic.
“Ooh!” Penny exclaimed as she jumped up and down with her hand raised.
“Penny!” James pointed at her as though he was calling on her in class.
“This isn’t helping!” I interrupted, and Penny frowned at me. Well, if that didn’t make me feel like a jerk, then nothing would. “Sorry, Penny. Wait just a minute.”
“You are not going to suggest that we share personal details of our pre-Pangaean lives, are you?” Brynna snidely asked, “This should not come as a surprise, but I will not be participating in a ridiculous emotional show-and-tell. Thank you so much.”
“You have to! You’re in the group, so you have to,” I snapped at her, “Why are you always so difficult?”
There was a part of me that was amused by her presence. There was even a small part of me that liked her, for reasons that were not clear. But her constant disagreement on any suggestion posed by anyone other than James and Elijah was beginning to aggravate me. Her disdain and her condescension were becoming too much to bear under the already stressful circumstances.
“I am difficult because people are disturbingly empty-headed.”
“That doesn't matter!” I told her angrily. “You're still a part of this group.”
“Well, then, I suppose I'm exiled.” Brynna replied apathetically.
“Brynn, be nice.” Penny ordered her gently. She walked up and grasped her hand. Brynna looked down at her little sister, smiled slightly, and offered no more argument on the subject.
“What is my favorite color?” Elijah asked.
“Clear,” Violet answered, “Because you’re boring.”
We all laughed at that. To diffuse the tension further, we all began to suggest ridiculous questions.
“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” Alice suggested.
“How many minutes does it take to save fifteen percent or more on your car insurance?” Violet added.
“What was my mother’s sister’s aunt’s cousin’s uncle’s father’s, twice removed, name?” Nick replied.
“If an oddly out of place tree falls in a Pangaean forest, does it make a sound?” I even added to the discussion even though it was poking fun at the exercise I had suggested in the first place. Ahead of us, Brynna and Penny were singing some old Johnny Cash song softly.
“Besides Johnny Cash, who are two other bands or singers that Brynna deems worthy of existence?” James suggested.
“Do you know that?” Elijah laughed, “I can name one, but that's it.”
“I can name several. But there are two that come to mind besides Mr. Cash.” James replied.
“Excuse me, sir, but my musical tastes were disclosed to you in confidence during a day of boredom.”
“Well, I do apologize, ma’am.” James made a point not to touch her after he said that because Elijah was watching them in slight suspicion. James didn’t even look at her after he spoke. But I did see a small smile spread across her face.
“In what movie does Kate Winslet get naked?” I spat out quickly to change the subject.
 “Oh, Kate…” Elijah sighed and looked up at the sky, “Thank God for her, man…”
“Every movie,” Violet answered, “That was a trick question. I like it.”
We continued on until we broke free of the trees. We found ourselves at the bank of a wide, deep river. Rapids rippled ominously against the large, sharp rocks.
“Look, Brynn! Look!” Penny exclaimed as James picked her up. “Look, James! Over there!”
James and Brynna were looking where she was pointing. On the bank of the river was a toad the size of a boulder. Its massive throat shot out with each deafening croak.
“Holy shit…” Elijah muttered before we all burst out laughing again.
“I saw a lion yesterday.” Brynna was telling Penny, “Guess how big it was.”
Penny beamed brightly as she continued to stare at the frog.
“Was it as big as Mr. Brock's pitbull?” She asked after looking back at Brynna.
“Bigger,” Brynna answered, “It was as big as Eli's car. Maybe even bigger than that, too.”
“No, it wasn't!” Elijah protested with another laugh, “You're making that up! And besides, a lion wouldn't be in a forest, Brynn. Come on, use your abnormally huge brain!”
“Excuse you, I have no reason to lie to her about something as trivial as a creature in the woods. And who says that lions can't live in the woods? The planet is called Pangaea for a reason, Elijah. The land is joined together. Any animal can live anywhere it wants. Are you unaware of the original theory of Pangaea? Earth was joined together once, too. Goodness, don't you read?” Brynna snapped at him.
“No.” Elijah answered simply. He and I laughed raucously, and she scowled in response. “I got through pre-med and two years of med school even though I used pages of my textbook to wipe my ass.”
I laughed even harder, and he laughed, too, until Brynna turned around and hit him really hard in the shoulder.
“Ow! Bitch!”
She hit him again, even harder.
“Language!” She pointed at Penny. “And gender-based insult!”
“Yeah, Eli! You’re using bad words!” Penny snapped at him, and she crossed her arms over her chest and stood with one foot stuck out in front of her the same way Brynna was standing at that moment.
“Oh, if I had a camera…” James said, and Brynna’s actual scowl dissolved into a fake one that he mimicked.
“Fine, you saw a lion!” Elijah told her, moving his arm around in circles to work the pain out. 
“Do you think we'll see a penguin?!” Penny asked excitedly.
“I'll bet we could.” Brynna replied, and she was smiling again.
“Did the lion try to attack you?” Alice asked her.
“No. We looked at one another for a long while, and then she allowed me to pet her. It was definitely surreal, though. As is that impossibly enormous frog.”
“Now, we shouldn’t go near it, guys.” Penny warned us, “Its tongue is probably so big and sticky, it will grab us and eat us in one bite!”
Brynna beamed again and looked at her. “You are right, wise Penelope. Come, let us retrace our steps back through the woods to avoid this treacherous river and all its terrible beasts entirely.”
“Why would we go back into the woods? Why don’t we just swim across? Look.” Violet pointed up to the top of a cliff that rose eerily out of the trees. There at the top, we could just see one of the military tents from the ship. It was our campsite.
Brynna cleared her throat and pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear as she turned to Violet.
“First of all…”
“Here we go…” James muttered, and he ran his hand over his head. “Brynna, come on. There's no time...”
“No, she is going to hear this in its entirety, James Maxwell! Do not try to stop me!” Brynna shot at him in a fury that the situation did not merit at all. “First of all, Violet, at this point in time, you are the only one out of this merry band of survivors to make a disgustingly foolish decision that almost ended your life. Secondly, that monstrous amphibian seated so serenely on that rock is more than likely just one beast that lives in this water. Third, you pointed upwards, to the top of a sprawling, gargantuan cliff. Therefore, you must be aware, given that you were the one who pointed up, that it is quite high and more than likely, impossible to climb without proper rappelling equipment. Have I gotten my point across yet, or must I continue?”
Violet sighed heavily and ran her fingers through her hair.
“I am so done fighting with you,” She muttered irritably in response to Brynna's points. “Sure. You win.”
“Not necessary, Brynna.” James snapped as he pointed his finger at her.
“Absolutely necessary, James.” Brynna pointed back at him, her eyes blazing.
“Just out of curiosity, is everything that I say going to met with your typical bullshit?”
“Oh, stop the presses, more profanity!” Brynna laughed as she held her hands up to the sky. “That really dissuades me from criticizing you further. Penny, do not let me hear that word escape your mouth. Understood?”
“I don’t say potty words.” Penny replied as she defiantly narrowed her eyes at Violet. “That’s not nice, Vi! It’s rude!” She pointed an accusing finger at her, and James turned his head away, trying to suppress a chuckle.
“Do you hear that, Violet? It’s rude. She’s absolutely right.” I told her jokingly, and she smiled.
And for the first time, I realized that she was really beautiful. I don’t know how, being a guy, I hadn’t noticed it before. But now, with the afternoon sun at her back, casting an otherworldly, almost holy glow over her light brown hair, illuminating her skin, casting a shadow perfectly to accentuate her body…
Oh, boy. I looked away immediately upon feeling Alice’s eyes on me. But then, why did I care what she thought? Violet hadn’t killed anyone, at least as far as I knew. Alice had. I looked back at Violet, but she had turned away to look up at the top of the cliff. Then, she looked down to one side of the river and up to the other end. I did the same, seeing that the trees continued along its banks for as far as the eye could see.
“I thought you said you knew where we were going, guys.” Violet scolded Nick, Elijah, and James.
“This is why we need to start navigating.” Alice told her.
“And setting up camp.” Violet added.
“And rationing the food.” Alice agreed.
“This is going to turn into some sort of ‘girl power’ moment, isn’t it?” I asked them with a roll of my eyes.
“It already has.” Alice replied coldly, “Alright, I’m going across. We’ll have to hike all the way in that direction to run parallel with the cliff. Remember how the campsite was surrounded by a marsh? Well, I think that was on the other side.”
“How did we loop around the river?” Violet asked, “The forest is huge.”
“Exactly,” Alice replied, “We wouldn’t have realized it if we went around. We’ve been walking for days. We’ve walked over water. That water was probably run-off from here.”
“I think we should just try to loop around again.” Nick suggested.
“That will take far too much time.” Brynna informed him curtly. “The people who went south will be long gone by the time we get to the campsite to track them. No, Alice’s actions are necessary and very courageous. Lead the pack, darling.”
“Was that a term of endearment?” Alice asked with a grin, “Wow. I'm kind of honored.”
“Yes. It surprised me as well.” Brynna replied sardonically.
“You’re not swimming across.” I told Alice, “Are you kidding me?”
“No, I'm not. You got a better idea?” She raised her eyebrows at me, “Once I’m across, I’ll look and see if there’s any way up.”
“The people who went west probably came through here. They’re probably making camp close by here because it’s a source of water.” Elijah suggested. He was trying to dissuade her further but she was already shedding her jacket and handing it to Brynna.
“Oh, for the love of Homer...” Brynna heaved a huge sigh of resignation and handed Alice's jacket to James. “I will not let you do this alone.”
“You don't have to come with me. If anything happens, you have way more to lose.”
“We both have four limbs, a torso, and a head. If there are any creatures lurking in the water looking to rip us to shreds, I will lose the same number of body parts that you will.”
“That's not what I meant.”
“I know.”
“Brynna, are you insane!? Seriously, have you completely lost your mind?” James demanded after grabbing her hand to stop her from going into the water. “We don't know what's in there. Besides, it's not like the rivers at home. Look,” He pointed down, “You can't even see the bottom.”
“Please do not fret for my sake, James.” Brynna replied with little care in her voice, “This young girl has volunteered to venture onward with little thought of her own safety. It is a selfless act meant to further our group's mission. For once in my life, I am playing the wing-woman to an act of heroism. This is a big moment for me.”
“I know you're being sarcastic right now, but you forget that we...”
“Shh!” Brynna exclaimed as she reached forward to touch his lips, “That statement lacked any semblance of sarcasm, for your information.”
She looked into his eyes for one long moment, wanting to kiss him, but Elijah was watching them closely. In her mind, she believed that he could have no suspicion based on the careful distance she and James were keeping from one another. But I knew better. He was beginning to sense that there was more to their relationship than just friendly antagonism.
Brynna and Alice walked forward slowly, cringing at the touch of the water.
“Oh my God, that's cold...” Alice gasped out as they walked a little further.
Once they cleared the rocks they were walking on, they were in water that was over their head. From the shore, the current had looked so weak but now, they were fighting to swim straight ahead. It was strong enough to send them sideways.
“Brynn!” Elijah ran to jump in the water, but Violet grabbed his hand and held him back.
“Look!” She screamed, pointing at something surfacing in the water. First, it appeared to be a tentacle belonging to perhaps a large octopus. What an octopus would be doing in freshwater was irrelevant. We were on Pangaea, not Earth. We didn't know which animals inhabited which habitats here. We were all staring, wide-eyed, as the frog on the bank of the river rolled backwards, end over end, in order to face the woods. It hopped away in bounding leaps, croaking frantically. Just as the frog reached the tree-line, the “tentacle” reached out and wrapped around it. The frog's massive weight was pulled with ease.
Right beside Alice, a massive head erupted out of the water. Its eyes were black and empty like a shark's, but its snout elongated like a dog's. In its mouth were rows and rows of fanged teeth. Those many sharpened daggers pierced into the frog's head and pulled backwards to rip it clean from its scaly body.
“Swim, Alice!” Brynna's voice shouted even though they were already kicking and paddling with everything they had. The current was moving around the beast, pulling them closer to its huge body. Another tentacle sprung from the water and headed straight for them.
“Duck! Go under!” Brynna screamed again, and without hesitation, they both plunged under the water.
The creature ducked its head under to search for them. It turned backwards and disappeared beneath the current.
“Run along the river. Meet us wherever it ends.” James told us hurriedly before diving into the deep part where Alice and Brynna had begun their swim.
“We're not getting separated again. Penny, hold onto me.” Elijah ordered quickly, “Can you swim, man?!”
I realized that he was talking to me. I could only nod in response as I stared at the violently churning rapids and the long tentacles rising out of the water several yards downstream.
“I don't want to go in there... I don't want to go in there...” Violet was muttering to herself.
“Let's go!” Elijah threw Penny onto his back and jumped in the water, too.
I followed suit, thinking of nothing but those black eyes. I pictured hundreds of them looking up at me from the bottom of the river that was so far below me. The thought snatched my breath from me. Even though I was finding it harder to breathe, I swam faster as that fear took over me.
Soon, we had no need to paddle. The current picked up as we were carried downstream. I was rolled and tossed by the water with no mercy. Twice, I slammed into rocks; the pain was horrible, but when I went to gasp, I only took in huge mouthfuls of water. I didn't know how I hadn't drowned yet. I was barely breathing. I couldn't swim. The water was pulling me further and further into its depths. I hated imagining that huge aquatic beast swimming rapidly up towards the surface below Alice and Brynna, its black eyes alive with hungry glee...
“Grab him!” A voice screamed, “Please! Don't let go! Don't let him go!”
A hand grasped my ankle tightly. Or was it one of those tentacles? I was being held under the water, or was I being pulled down into its black depths?
I had never seen a river beast, though I remembered the stories about “Nessie” on Earth. My oxygen-deprived brain tried to remember which body of water she had supposedly lived in. I couldn't even remember the names of the oceans... Everything was slipping away.
I hated Pangaea. I hated all its hidden dangers and its weird creatures. I wished that I had stayed behind to die because at least my untimely end would have been quick and mostly painless.
My lungs were filling up, stopping their function like they were electrical machines suddenly doused in water. Circuits were spraying sparks like Fourth of July fireworks. I was dying slowly.
I had heard that drowning was only painful and scary for a few minutes. Then, you just drifted away. I would not just sink to the depths of that river, never to be seen again. I was being pulled in by that fanged, terrifying creature as water rushed through my ears and flooded my brain. More sparks exploded wildly.
“QUINN!” Alice's voice shrieked in terror for a quick second. My head was under the water. When it resurfaced, I heard her again.
 “...HIM! DON'T LET...”
I blacked out.
***

“It's all very simple. Twenty-three chest compressions that keep blood circulating. ‘Rescue breathing’ into the victim's mouth in order to refill the stores of oxygen they have lost. This is First Aid 101.”
I had never been so happy to hear the voice of Brynna Olivier. I opened my eyes and saw only the darkening sky overhead. The dark purple was calming for my eyes that were hazed over with river water. The orange clouds hurt, though. I squeezed my eyes shut again to block them out.
“It was like a hydra! Do you know a hydra?” Nick was asking in a trembling yet excited voice, “But it had those tentacle things!”
“I wonder if we were to cut off its head if more would grow back? If two more heads would grow back...” Elijah mused with the same enthusiasm. I watched as their shadowy outlines swung their arms around like they were wielding swords or, if the sound effects Nick was making were anything to go by, light-sabers. 
“I don't know!” Nick replied, “But I'll bet that two more would grow back!”
“Perhaps you two should try to behead that serpent and see what actually does occur? At the most, the Biblical symbolism of such an act would surely be discussed extensively by all those that heard your valiant, noble tale. At the least, it would be a thrilling event to witness for myself and your fellow comrades.”
Well, I was so glad that my almost-death was such a thought-provoking and exciting experience for them. I sat up quickly but immediately fell backwards again into someone's arms.
“Quinn!” Alice's lips were on mine quickly. Her hand was rested on my face. I forgot everything that had happened since I found her in the process of killing that native. I only knew that our whole fight had been so stupid, so I kissed her back.
“Strong woman you have got there, good sir. Completely unfazed by complete emotional and situational chaos. Even the thought that you might be done for could not sway her nobility.” Brynna came into my view behind Alice. “I am a little wary of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, so be happy that your erstwhile girlfriend was here to administer it.”
I was laughing through my fit of coughs. Alice waited until I was done, watching me the entire time with such relief on her face. I didn't know if it was just water dripping down her face or tears.
“I'm sorry.” I grasped her face. She shook her head before kissing me again.
“I love you.” She replied.
“I love you, too. Are you okay?” I asked, “Really stupid idea, Allie.”
“It was. It was so stupid!” She laughed through what I knew were tears for sure now. “I almost got all of us killed.”
“It was a valiant effort. But yes, we can all blame our near-death experience on you. We can all blame our nightmares filled with aquatic beasts on you, as well.” Brynna replied, and I watched her duck behind a tree, pulling James with her by the hand.
“I don't want to swim anymore.” Penny was telling Violet as she shook her head back and forth with wide eyes.
“Me neither. Not around here, anyway. When that thing popped up...” Violet giggled half-hysterically now as she shook with adrenaline.
“I think if I had had to pee, it would have happened right there...” Elijah replied.
“You're telling me.” Alice responded, “I'm surprised Brynna and I didn't fall over dead at the sight of it.”
“This is some place, isn't it?”
“Guys, come here!” Nick called from a few feet away. We followed his voice.
We found him standing, surrounded by the mouth of a cave; apparently, we had run parallel to the cliff as we floated downstream. I didn't want to think, even for a second, about having to climb up the steep slope.
“Well, it's either walk all the way back up the river and climb or try it this way.” Elijah told us grimly.
“Try it through the cave?!” Alice exclaimed in shock.
The trek back would be long and tiring. We had no way to camp now, as we had lost our supplies in the river. We also had no food again. However, once we arrived at the campsite we could look for rations boxes. Going into the cave didn't guarantee that we would end up where we needed to be, though. I was not looking forward to exploring the darkness inside.
Just as I went to voice all of these concerns, the noises of the forest silenced suddenly. We were all on edge; everyone except for Penny was looking around with white eyes. I looked up with my own, smelling the air and observing the thick, light gray clouds that blocked out the brilliant blue of the sky.
The natives were coming straight for us.
“You made peace with them, didn't you?” Elijah whispered to Brynna and James hurriedly, and we all looked abruptly in the direction where we had just seen a flash of movement.
“No. He healed her but he never said he would leave us alone.”
“But he let you leave the city!”
“He likes the chase, Eli. How many times must I explain this to you?” Brynna barked back in a furious whisper. We jerked our heads in another direction simultaneously.
“How do we know he's even coming for us?” Violet asked, “Maybe there are others around that they're after.”
“Everyone make sure that you can see in the dark. The sun is setting.” Alice instructed us quickly.
We all stood perfectly still, awaiting their first move. Maybe we would hear screams in the distance. Maybe Brynna and James had inadvertently made peace with them, and they weren’t hunting us. We couldn't be sure.
A scream sounded, high-pitched and girlish, behind us. We all whipped around to see Penny being dragged into the cave by hands that had suddenly appeared from inside of it.
“PENNY!” Brynna screamed, darting forward as the others descended on us.
I picked up a thick stick covered in thorns, barely wincing as my hands began to bleed. A man was running towards me, hissing and roaring with spit dripping from his large, lion-like fangs. I understood now. I understood why Alice had to do what she had done. That man, given one small chance, would kill me without a single blink or a second of remorse. If it was possible, he would rip into me while I was still able to process the pain. It was kill or be killed, a very old notion generally used to justify the taking of a life. In this case, it really was the only way. No justification was necessary on Pangaea.
I swung the branch with all the force I could summon. The man ducked the swing and instantly lunged forward to tackle me around the middle. As his arms locked around me, I recovered from the shock of not hitting him and swung downwards. The thorn-covered branch plunged into his back and he fell to the ground, wounded but not out completely. I hit him over and over again until a spray of blood splattered onto my face, and he didn't move anymore.
“Quinn, let's go!” Alice's voice called.
She was grasping the rocks at the corner of the cave's entrance. They were headed inside. James, Brynna, Elijah and Violet were already gone. Nick, Alice, and I were going after them. The other natives were retreating, watching us fall back into the darkness of the cave. They had little need to wonder if we would meet our deaths inside because one of their own had pulled Penny into its depths and would definitely finish us off. That's what I thought, anyway.
But no, as I turned back to watch the five remaining outside, I saw that their eyes were wide in terror as they watched us disappear.
“Guys,” I muttered back to Nick and Alice, “Maybe we shouldn't...”
“Come on.” Alice grasped my hand and pulled me deeper into the cave.
“I don't know what we ever did to them. They're accusing us of wanting to do something that no one wants to do. Not one of us wants to destroy this planet the way Earth was destroyed! But that's what they're accusing us of! It's not right!” Nick was exclaiming angrily as he stalked ahead of us.
“Look!” Nick and I watched as she picked up a large stick and Brynn's lighter. “She must have left this for us. Yeah, this is what she was burning the other day to make a fire. See this sap?” She held the branch right under my eyes that were already confused by such vast darkness and their ability to see in it. Alice struggled to light the lighter, and I reached out to take it from her.
I held the flame to the branch and watched it catch onto the wood. The sap fizzled and cracked, sending sparks dancing towards the stone ceiling of the cave. Alice swung the torch around to see the cave walls.
“Alright. It should burn for a while. Come on!”
I looked over my shoulder one last time before hurrying along in their wake. Both were on their mission to go after James, Brynna, Elijah, and Penny but I wanted nothing more than to turn back.
Something was waiting for us deep in the cave. Perhaps it was more than one thing; I had no way of knowing. But that familiar tugging had resumed in my chest, reminding me that all the decisions made up until that point had led to disaster. Our group was impulsive at best and suicidal at worst. I was the only level-headed one of the bunch. My head always overrode my heart, and I wasn't ashamed to admit it.
Now I was allowing my heart to guide me. I would not let Alice face anything alone now that I understood her ability to kill. I had experienced the same drive while facing the prospect of my own death. I had almost seen her get eaten by that river monster. I had seen her fight expertly when we were overrun by those Shadows. She was the one always protecting me and making the hard decisions, though I would never tell her that. I silently vowed to start splitting the heavy weight fifty-fifty.
I knew that no speculation or temptation would convince her to turn back. Nick was already five feet ahead of us, walking blindly into the dark with just a faint glow from Alice's torch.
“We've got to start thinking this stuff through.” I muttered to Alice, “We need to start planning, learning to defend ourselves. We need to make weapons.”
“Those are all good ideas, babe, but none of that helps us now. We need to focus on what we're doing. We'll talk more about that later.”
“I'm just saying. We're only going to get lucky so many times. Every time we've survived these random things this place throws at us, it's been because of luck.”
“That's not true,” Alice replied with a quick shake of her head, “It's been a miracle, actually. But only partly. The other part is that we're stronger now. We're faster, and we're better fighters. We're adapting. It's an even split.”
“I guess so.”
I didn't actually agree.

Violet

James and Brynna were ahead of Elijah and me. James held the torch up, and its flame lit the cave with an ominous orange glow. We were unstoppable, walking quickly after Penny. We couldn’t pinpoint exactly what had grabbed her, though we assumed that natives had been hiding in the cave, waiting for us to be foolish enough to enter it. When we had been hesitant, they had taken Penny, knowing that we would follow.
“I just want to offer a fair warning to each of you, though my justification is more than likely unnecessary.” Brynna told Elijah, James, and me quickly without looking back at us. “When I find those that took her, I am going to kill every last one of them.”
She was right; her justification really wasn’t necessary. We would all kill anyone who threatened Penny.
“She’s just a little girl.” I whispered tremulously, “Why would they take her?”
“Their business should have been with us!” Elijah spat furiously, “She’s five. She has nothing to do with this.”
“We’re keeping at least one alive.” James told us, and in his voice, I heard no room for negotiation. I didn’t want to spare a single one. I wanted them all dead for taking Penny. I could feel her fear in the back of my mind. It was distant, like a sickness held off by a vaccine but still present in the blood. Brynna could feel the full force of it. I knew by the way her body held tension in every muscle and her eyes bugged like she was expecting a physical blow. Once or twice, she looked over her shoulder at me. I knew that she was remembering scooping me up after I had been attacked. I knew thinking that I was going to die had petrified her. I wanted to apologize, but it wasn’t the right time yet. Soon, the opportunity would present itself, and I would tell her that though it wasn’t entirely my fault that I was attacked, I was still deeply sorry for what my almost-death had made her feel. I understood her anger at me.
“I’ll stay close, Brynn.” I muttered to her quietly after walking up behind her. She gave me an almost imperceptible nod in response. I watched as her hands balled into fists and then released over and over again. “We’re going to find her, I promise.”
“I should be reassuring you. I know you are as afraid as I am. I should be telling you everything is going to be alright.” There was a soft, almost inaudible pain in her voice that I had never heard before. Her genuine regret had surfaced because she thought she was falling short of her self-appointed duties. I walked up beside her quickly and squeezed her hand, feeling that her palm was wet with a cold, nervous sweat. Losing Penny was her worst fear. I had always known that.
“It’s okay,” I told her gently, “Just let me be there for you right now. It’s alright.”
This time, she didn’t nod or even look at me. Giving herself over to be cared for by another was not something she was comfortable with. But she squeezed my hand when I went to let go of hers; I had been ready to retreat from her when her anger and self-righteousness made themselves known. Instead, she was keeping me beside her and allowing me to silently soothe her fears by just holding onto her hand.
“Stop.” James held his hand up, and we halted but continued to stare ahead with our white eyes. Brynna tilted her head back to take one long inhalation.
“Natives.” She whispered to James.
“A lot of them,” James agreed, “Too many to count. We’ll never be able to handle them all.”
“Not in this tight space, no.” Brynna crept around the wall of rock that was in front of us. When she came back around, her skin had paled even more. “There are at least one hundred of them. I do not know what they’re doing.”
Elijah, James, and I walked around to see. To our immediate left, there was a staircase chiseled from the rock. We were on the makeshift landing, hidden by a rock wall about five feet high. I put my hands on the cold stone and looked over cautiously to see the natives engaged in what looked like a group interpretive dance performance. They were swaying their hands in the air, humming all together to create an eerie, echoing drone that bounced around the large open space of the cave.
Lion’s den. The term popped into my mind before I had time to suppress it. It was accurate; we were in their territory now. Our chances of escaping were slim. Our chances of fighting them all off were nonexistent.
“I had the very same thought when I entered Adam's home.” Brynna told me as she watched the natives. “Though I must say, this is a far stranger experience. It is even stranger than him.”
They twirled their wrists and reached their hands out far simultaneously. If we weren’t facing our swift yet painful deaths, I would have loved to observe them as they were. I had always said that it would be cool to observe primitive tribes going about their daily activities. For a minute, I watched, dumbfounded and fascinated, wishing I had a guide who could explain exactly what they were doing.
“Look!” Brynna whispered. I looked at her to find that she was standing behind James and holding onto him around the middle with one shaking arm. She was pointing up.
In the flickering fire light, we saw a mural that spanned the entire mass of the ceiling. It was a red painting of a four-armed man. In each hand, he was holding something different. In one, there was an eye similar to what would be found drawn on the wall of an ancient Egyptian temple. In another, there was a small stick-figure man pointing a bow and arrow at the sky. On the other side, the drawing’s hand was holding a flame encircled by black ash. And in the fourth, there was an apple. I was so busy trying to decipher exactly what the symbols meant that I didn’t realize the picture was caked onto the rock with dried blood. Over the many years, the blood had hardened; the image was etched onto the rock forever.
“We have to get Penny. We have to get her, James.” I heard Brynna whispering to him. When I looked at her again, I saw that she was standing on her tiptoes and pressing her forehead to the back of his neck. Both of her arms were around his middle now, and he was rubbing them gently.
“I know, baby. I’m working on it.” He whispered back as his eyes scanned down below for a way through that wouldn’t alert them to our presence.
“I have an idea.” I whispered. Out of reflex, Brynna scowled at me but then immediately relaxed her face. Her anger at me had dissipated. There was just no time for it.
“What is it?” She asked.
“We need to create a diversion.”
“Alright. Let me through.” Elijah whispered but then, there was silence in the room below us. We all instantly dropped down to our knees to hide below the wall.
“On this night, we offer a sacrifice to the One God,” A man’s deep voice was saying, “The All-Knowing, All-Seeing gift-bearer will receive our message of gratitude. He will receive the body and soul of this child who will not reveal her name.”
“Good girl, Penny…” Brynna whispered as she moved back and forth on her feet slightly, ready to spring forward at any minute.
“Until we know the child’s name, we cannot continue.”
“But He will strike us down!” A woman’s voice exclaimed frantically.
“The others will overtake us!”
Someone, perhaps the cave-idiot, stood up and spoke in a humble voice.
“Why are we speaking in the tongues of the Earth man?”
“Because we are not alone, Even. Three orphans of Earth have followed us. They are there.”
All of us looked at each other in horror.
“Can you not smell the poisonous air from their destroyed Orb that clings to them?”
In response to his rude comment, there was an outpouring of laughter.
Brynna jumped up, her eyes ablaze. James followed her as she began to descend the stairs. Elijah clearly wanted to follow but his steely resolve from a moment earlier had vanished only to be replaced by useless fear. I stood because I was unafraid of those barbarians and all their ridiculous babble.
“So, your speech was rousing, as I am sure you know.” Brynna's voice carried around the opening, reflecting the authoritative tone back to me. Where she found the courage to be so forceful in such a terrifying situation, I didn’t know. If we survived, I would ask her in hopes of being able to emulate it someday.
“But you are lying to your sheep, sir. Yes,” She looked at the many natives who were glaring at her, “I called you sheep. I want my sister.”
I took a step closer to James when I saw that some had allowed their eyes to turn over white and their fangs to shoot out. It was going to get real very quickly.
“Sister?” Their leader asked.
“Yes. It is an English word meaning ‘female born to other children of the same parents, in relation to the other children.’ Sound familiar?” Her words were dripping with their usual sarcasm and condescension, but her body was trembling with fury that threatened to boil over at any moment.
“James...” I whispered, but he shushed me. After a moment, he reached back and put his arm around my shoulders, and I immediately felt a little safer.
“Whatever Higher Power for whom you are currently gesticulating will have to wait while you find a substitution.” Brynna continued. “I want her back now.”
Their leader took a step back upon meeting her eyes.
“But she is of Earth…” He was trying to retain his composure but it was escaping him, “I was told you are of Earth. It is true that you are changing, but how?!”
Her patience evaporated. Whatever fragile hold she had on her self-control slipped from her grasp. In a blink, she had lunged forward and tackled him. His body was twisted backwards over a rock that rose from the ground. In her rage, James, Elijah, and I found ours. It was beginning to become apparent that when one of us snapped over into animal-mode, the rest would quickly follow suit. It was like an infection that spread through the air between targets.
I grabbed the first person nearest to me and threw him to the ground. I hissed in the man's face as I grasped his throat tightly.
“You are not of Earth! It is a lie! This is a lie told by the Others!” The man who had led the ceremony exclaimed not in fear, but in fury of his own. “I cannot believe this. I cannot believe the One God would...”
“Bring her to me.” Brynna ordered furiously. “James!”
“What?!” James barked at her as his hands clamped even more tightly around a young man’s upper arms. The boy, barely older than me, grimaced in pain.
“Whichever one you are holding, bring him.”
“No! James, no!” A woman erupted into a fit of tears that should have softened us. But I felt no sympathy for any of them. I allowed myself not to worry for even a second about preserving or ending their lives. There was one option: Kill or be killed. I knew it. We all knew it.
“You shut up!” I screamed at the woman as another of her kind held her tightly.
“Please, he is my only son! Mister James...” The woman was attempting to fall onto her knees, but her fellow cave-mates held her up. Her pleas for mercy would soon turn to Brynna, I was sure. My sister was the person ordering her only son to be taken from her, after all.
Brynna was unconcerned with the woman. Her eyes were fixated on the man she was holding to the rock. Her focus was only on keeping him alive long enough to learn Penny's location.
“Bring her to me, or I will rip you and every last one of your people apart. This is only mild aggravation. I do not think that you want to see rage.” Brynna told the leader slowly and fiercely, as though he didn’t comprehend her words or was purposely disregarding how serious she was.
“Just kill him, Brynna!” Elijah shouted in beastly rage, “Stop playing with him and kill him! He took Penny!”
“I can see everything you see except the reason.” Brynna whispered, and I looked over at her to see that she wore a quizzical expression on her face. “I have seen faint pictures of all things. But this…”
“You do see all things?” The man raised his head up, looking at her intently. She snapped out of her reverie and pushed his head back down forcefully. He gave one weak exclamation of pain.
“Bring the girl!” He shouted into the dark corridor just off of the open space we were standing in. “Is she yours?”
“She is my sister. Weren’t you listening?!” Brynna shot at him angrily before turning her eyes back to the corridor.
“How strange, the light in your heart for her…” He reached up and placed his hand on her chest. Instantly, James pulled the boy away from the wall by the back of his shirt and stormed over. But Brynna had already snapped the man's wrist clean in half. She looked intoxicated as he screamed in pain; there was a small smile on her lips and her eyes had closed. James grabbed his broken wrist and squeezed it hard. The bone shifted and a disgusting squishing sound could be heard. The man screamed again, and they both laughed softly in response. I would have cringed at what they were doing, but my blood-lust was shrieking in feverish desire to see the man tortured. I found myself laughing along with them. The sound reverberated back at us, amplified and hysterical, downright hyena-like. Some of the natives, whom earlier had been so ready to fight us, were beginning to shrink back into the shadows, their trembling no longer of indignant rage but of fear.
“I should snap your neck next.” All of James’s lighthearted amusement disappeared abruptly and his voice raised to a frighteningly loud shout, “You will not touch her!”
After his pain had subsided, the leader managed to say through gritted teeth:
“And you are a Protector now…”
“Let us help you, please!” A woman who still wanted to fight despite our show of adrenaline-induced hysteria pleaded with the leader breathlessly. Her fangs were glinting in the firelight, and her eyes were fixed on James and Brynna; I saw in her the same strong, undeniable urge to fight that we were all experiencing currently.
“No!” The man shouted indignantly, “I do not need your help! Stay back!”
“Brynna!” Penny’s voice screamed as two men dragged her into the open space by her tiny arms.
A soft cry of relief escaped both Brynna and myself as we ran forward to throw our arms around Penny. Our little sister's entire body was shaking with fear and cold and delicate cries.
Elijah charged one of the guards but stepped back upon seeing our sister. Physically, she was perfectly fine, thank God. But there was a terror in her eyes that replaced the glow of youth we were so used to seeing in her.
“Hold on, baby girl.” Brynna instructed softly. Penny wrapped her arms and legs around Brynna's middle. Brynna shed her jacket and maneuvered Penny into it. “Shh... Shh... You're alright, baby. I've got you.”
“This is your leader, ladies and gentlemen.” James pointed at the man whom he had just released. “He has been attacked and injured by two people who were barely even trying. If any of you try to follow us, you will see the full extent of what we can do!”
“If you take one of ours, it will mean that you wish to go to war!” Their leader called after us in warning, as though he was telling us that for our own good before we made a terrible, life-threatening mistake.
“Shh…” Brynna whispered to Penny. James grasped the back of Brynna's neck and led her along ahead of us. Penny was attached to the front of her chest and crying into her shoulder.
“Do you want me to carry her?” He asked her softly.
Brynna shook her head as I ran up to walk by her side. My hands flew up to rub Penny's back and to stroke her hair.
We allowed our feet to guide us back the way we had come. We had been in such a panic when we were running into the cave after Penny that we hadn’t marked our trail. Luckily for us, our instincts were getting stronger. At their current level of strength, they could lead us to safety.
When we emerged from the cave, Alice, Quinn, and Nick were sitting on the ground, waiting for us.
“Good teamwork, guys.” I spat at them sarcastically as I ran my hand down the back of Penny’s soft hair again.
“Who is that?!” Nick demanded furiously. He pointed to the boy who was struggling to free himself from Elijah’s tight grasp.
“Is she okay?” Alice ran over and touched Penny’s back.
“We are taking him, whether you like it or not!” I heard Elijah bark at Quinn and Nick. “We went in there. We saved Penny. We’re making the decisions from here on out!”
“He’s one of them! Are you mad?!” Nick asked, and he looked between all of us, awaiting further explanation.
“No, we aren't. In fact, this is the sanest thing we've done since we've been here!” James snapped at him before grabbing the boy by both of his arms and dragging him off.
His cavalier nature that so smartly rivaled Brynna's arrogance and disdain for all things was gone. He was losing his grip on the situation, and it was wearing him down right before our eyes. Now, we had a prisoner. What were we supposed to do with him?
Nick's gentle touch on my arm snapped me out of my thoughts.
“I don't want to talk to you.” I walked away from him, trying to force my eyes to turn back over to their normal brown by blinking feverishly.
“Why? What did I do?”
“You stayed out here!”
“Yeah, and we had to kill four natives! They dragged us out of the cave. They were going to kill us!”
“And then you just decided to let us handle that situation on our own? A five-year-old girl gets pulled into a cave by God knows what, you kill some natives, and then you just call it a day? Forget the fact that you and I have both been toying with the idea of having a relationship. Not to sound like an overly emotional stereotype, but how would I ever be able to trust you?!”
“Maybe because I've saved your life before!”
“Excuse me?!” I whipped around to face him. “When have you ever saved my life? If I recall correctly, I was the one swooping in to play Han Solo to your Princess Leia! I was the one fighting natives!”
“Did you just use a Star Wars reference?”
“Yeah, I did! As if you didn't know that I was a nerd already!”
“Why are you so angry?”
“Because, Nick! The three of you just sat out here while we faced those natives in the cave. I get that it's the twenty-first century in Earth time and that women can stand up for themselves. That's not what this is about. It's about you being able to defend me if I need you to! If I get myself into a bad situation, I would need to trust that you would be there for me. Look at James and Brynna! She almost gets eaten by a dinosaur-slash-kraken-slash-Loch Ness Monster-thing and he jumps in the water to save her! Penny gets dragged into a cave, Brynna runs in after her, and James follows. Do you see what I'm saying here?”
“Well, haven't your sister and James been together for a long time?!”
“No! They just got together like, a week ago!” I sighed heavily and looked up to the sky for guidance.
“I don't know what you would like for me to say, Violet.” He told me softly. “Whatever it is, just tell me, and I'll say it, alright?”
“This conversation is stupid. This whole thing is stupid. I shouldn't expect anything of you. We never set anything in stone, right? Plus, I don't need anyone to save me.”
Brynna's pride and self-righteous anger were flying from my mouth before I could stop them. Pride might have been a sin, but Brynna wore it like a badge of honor and rightfully so. Though she was currently going against every life principle she had ever established in terms of men and relationships by engaging in a romance with James, she had always been right about them. They were untrustworthy. All were cowards at their core. All would save themselves over their female partner if the choice was given because they lacked our maternal, caring nature that was cruelly inflicted on us by the Gods. 
Brynna's words, not mine.
But now, they were becoming mine. I stormed away from Nick, sickened by the sight of his face. How I ever believed that I could trust him after all Brynna had taught me was beyond my understanding. I was finished with dating. If my life was in danger, I needed a boy who would kill in order to save me. That was only if I needed saving. I needed a boy who would follow me into almost certain death with no hesitation. It was a grand, romantic thought that should have been accompanied by a string quartet and swans soaring overhead in a perfectly synchronized flight. It was so ridiculous.
It wasn't entirely unheard of, though. I watched James and Brynna walking ahead. Even as he steered the boy through the trees, he glanced at her every few seconds to make sure that she was beside him. In the fights that I had witnessed, he had never treated her as though she couldn't defend herself. It was only because he was her boyfriend that he accompanied her into dangerous situations. It wasn't because she needed to be saved by a big, strong man. Despite my anger, I smiled as I watched them walk. Brynna deserved no less than the man she had; he was kind, strong, and brave to the point of recklessness. He was even good-looking, to top it all off.
“Maybe I need to start looking for a man twice my age.” I mused to Alice.
“I should have followed you.” Alice ignored what I had said. It seemed to dawn on her, and she looked at me with her eyes widened. “No, don't do what she's doing. He's a great guy, don't get me wrong. But they'll never last, Violet.”
“What?” I took a step away from her. That anger that had dissipated so quickly took hold of me again.
“Come on, are you serious?” Alice asked and she actually chuckled slightly in disbelief. “She's twenty-two. He's like, forty-five. When has that ever worked?”
“On Earth, maybe it wouldn't have worked. Maybe it would have. We'll never know, will we?” I snapped at her bitterly. “You don't know my sister. You might think that you do, but you don't. She really cares for him. She trusts him. You have no idea what that means in Brynna's world.”
“Does she love him?” Her voice was saturated with lighthearted sarcasm.
“Yeah, I think she does, actually!” I replied indignantly. “Just because you and your boyfriend, who is your same age, can't make it work doesn't mean that Brynna and James can't. She's way mature for her age, and he loves her, too!”
“You're clearly not that mature for your age or else we wouldn't even be having this conversation.”
“Oh, shut up! All of you! How's this?” I had stormed ahead, but I turned back to face her, Quinn, and Nick. “You're cowards! All of you! We went into that cave after Penny, and you all stood out here and waited! If that had been any of you, I would have followed you. But you all are cowards!”
I turned around and walked quickly to catch up to Brynna, James, and Elijah. I didn't hear their snippy retorts. I wasn't even sure they had spoken any. I just knew that as soon as we met up with Don Abba's people, we were shaking those three immediately and continuing on our own.
It was the first seismic shift in our mindset. It was mirrored almost exactly in the other groups, though I wasn't aware of that yet. The question of cowardice was being posed to every man, woman and child by the circumstances that brewed beneath the fragile grasp we held on our lives. Being considered brave meant more than just being able to fight natives with every last bit of superhuman strength we possessed. It meant more than not succumbing to the fear that one would starve or dehydrate sooner rather than later. It also meant that one had to be able to make the tough, sometimes merciless decisions.
The boy we had stolen was one of those decisions. I watched as James and Brynna dragged him along, noting that he was maybe a year older than me, if that. Because of his sandy hair and tan skin, I was reminded of the surfer boys back home who lounged around on the beach all day. Some had been annoying because their ability to stand up on a board that was being thrust about by waves made them cocky enough to think that they could have any girl they wanted. But most had been harmless and just looking to have fun. It was a stupid thought, I knew. The boy we had taken had never seen Earth and was, in reality, nothing like those boys. I had to stop sympathizing, or else I would be as much of a coward as Alice, Quinn, and Nick were.
“What are we going to do with him, Brynn?” I asked after we had stopped walking. It had taken hours, but we had put as much distance between us and the cave as we could. James was pulling vines that crisscrossed around the trunk of an old oak tree; he used them to tie the boy to it.
“I hope he camped frequently as a child and knows how to tie a rope. Those knots have to be strong. I am sure that if we give him half the chance, he will break free and kill us all. We are going to need to keep watch over him for as long as he is with us.” She ran her fingers through her hair. I knew she was purposely evading my question because the answer had not come readily to her.
“I have many questions for him, none of which will help us substantially.”
“Like what?” I pressed her.
“Well, I want to know why they took Penny, first and foremost.”
“That man said they were going to...” I stopped, feeling a lump in my throat as horrible images of Penny being offered up as a human sacrifice to some faceless God bombarded my mind. “Well, you remember what they said.”
“They said that they would sacrifice her.” Brynna clearly hadn't heard a word I had said. “But why?”
“It was a religious sacrifice.” Elijah answered after coming up behind us. “You saw the way they were dancing around like that. Plus, there was that thing painted on the ceiling with the four arms. It's their deity.”
We blinked up at him in disbelief, neither one of us knowing how he knew that.
“What? I took Anthropology freshmen year.”
“Right. Indeed, you did. See?” She looked at me, “The benefits of a liberal-arts education. All that you just said will more than likely make up the bulk of that boy’s answer to my question. It does not help us at all. We could ask him for the whereabouts of a safe place to live, though I sincerely doubt that any place on this planet is safe from the eyes of the natives.” Brynna adjusted Penny, whom she was still holding to her chest. I moved Penny's hair out of her face to find that she had fallen asleep.
“It was too much for her. I cannot imagine the fear she must have felt.” Brynna muttered to us. She was trying hard to suppress the note of sadness in her voice that was brought about swiftly and easily by the thought of Penny in any kind of pain. “She just needs to sleep.”
“Do you want me to take her? Your arms are shaking because you've been carrying her for so long.” Elijah pointed, and for the first time, I noticed that Brynna's arms were shaking somewhat severely.
“Are you cold? Do you want my jacket?” I remembered that she had shed her own to give to Penny. While we were walking and it got colder, Brynna had pulled the hood up over Penny's head. I smiled slightly, thinking how cute Penny looked inside of the sweatshirt that, despite Brynna's small size, was still much too big for her.
“No. Keep it, dear.” She laid her head against Penny's. “And it's alright. I'll just sit down.”
“You can't carry her around forever, Brynn.” Elijah told her gently. “They're not going to get her again. I promise.”
“Promises are just words, no matter how honorable their intentions may be. There is no way you could possibly guarantee that Penny will not be taken by them again. The chances of them stealing her from me while she is attached to my chest are slim to none. And she is, quite literally, attached to my chest. Look...” She carefully maneuvered her hands so that she could push Penny away ever so slightly without waking her. Elijah and I both grimaced upon seeing that where Penny's bare skin met Brynna's, they were linked together.
“Oh my God...” Elijah muttered. He looked away and rubbed his eyes as a shudder of disgust passed through him. “How are you going to pry her off?”
“When she or I want to let go, we will let go, Eli.” Brynna replied with a sigh. “It is part of the mutation, I am assuming.”
“James, have you seen this?” Elijah pointed at Brynna when James came over to us.
For a moment, his eyes widened as he thought, I'm sure, that Brynna had been injured in some way. But then, he saw that Elijah was referencing Penny's attachment to her skin and he calmed.
“Oh. Yeah, I pointed that out to her. I assume it has some evolutionary meaning that I don't really feel like speculating about right now.”
“What are we going to do with him?” I expected the straight answer from James that I had wanted from Brynna. He didn't disappoint.
“We're going to find out what we want to know from him. After that...” He paused for a minute. Then, he shrugged, raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “I don't know.”
“What do we want to know from him? What can he tell us?” I prodded him further.
“We need to find out where we can go. We need a place where they can't get at us as easily. Then, we're going to find out why they're trying to kill us.” James continued breezily. “I also need to know if they have any weaknesses or if there are any kinds of real weapons on this stupid planet. Probably not, though.”
“I don't know. Their city was quite advanced. I am sure they have ways of protecting themselves. They more than likely do not manufacture guns, but knives and spears existing somewhere is certainly a plausible scenario.” Brynna chimed in.
“We're never going to be able to fight them with knives and spears.” My eyes were widened as I looked between the three of them.
“We will learn. We have adapted to survive this much, have we not? If we are meant to fight with knives and spears, then it will be done.” Brynna reassured me. “Did anyone else gather that the natives are split into two factions that I assume are at war with one another?”
“No. Where in the world did you get that from?” James asked her, “Did you read their minds?”
“One of the people, in her fit of pious terror, mentioned that their God was going to let the 'others' attack, if Penny was not sacrificed immediately. 'Overtake us' were her exact words.”
“And you think that by the others, she meant maybe the people in the city?” James asked. “Well, it would make sense. Why would those people be living in a cave when they could be living in that huge city? Do you think that them being at war with each other could help us?”
“Yes, I do,” Brynna answered, “But the reason why it will help us is one that, depending on your own personal morality, might repulse you.”
“Are any of us really that moral anymore?” I asked with a shrug.
There was silence; apparently, I had just said something deep that required a moment of thought. In that silence, I mused on the subject as well. Sure enough, I arrived at the conclusion that we weren't moral anymore. The longer we stayed on Pangaea, the more we embraced heartless brutality. We didn't really have a choice in the matter.
“What's your idea?” I wanted to break that uncomfortable quiet because the idea of losing my humanity was one that made my heart bound upwards into my throat. I feared becoming completely superhuman, as I now was able to understand and acknowledge the full implications of the change.
“I know the way I just know sometimes that this boy is important. I am sensing a familial connection to their leader. That man whom I assaulted, the one who was speaking, is their leader.”
“If there's a familial connection, why didn't he stop us from taking him?” Elijah asked.
“Perhaps he thought it was wiser to pretend that the boy was nothing than to give away his high standing. We would be more likely to hurt him if we knew he was of 'royal' blood, correct?” Brynna leaned forward in earnest as she explained.
“Yes.” James agreed, “I know what you're going to suggest. Do you want me to tell you?”
“Absolutely.”
“You think we should hand him over to the city-natives in exchange for our safety. He'd be a peace offering.”
“Indeed. I do not want to think for too long about what they might do to him. It will weaken my resolve to go through with the plan. But if this is our chance to live safely, then we need to take it. Running from them is only a temporary solution. It is not even a sure bet that we will escape them every time they come for us. This is our chance to guarantee our own safety.”
“But he's a kid!” Alice's voice exclaimed behind us in horror. We all jumped before turning around to see that she, Nick, and Quinn had been listening.
“The three of you were disqualified from these negotiations before they even began, I'm afraid.” Brynna informed them in a fake, rueful tone, “You gave up your rights to determine the fate of our young prisoner when you decided to sit, twiddling your thumbs, as we dragged him out of the cave with us after saving Penny.”
“You said something about them offering up Penny as a human sacrifice.” Quinn told us.
“Yes, I suppose if you were rudely eavesdropping, you would have heard that snippet of our conversation.” Brynna responded icily.
“So now, you want to offer up this guy as a sacrifice!” Quinn shouted in disgust, “He's a kid, just like us! You're no better than them if you do this. For all we know, he's never done anything a day in his life to deserve being killed!”
“We don't know that they'll kill him.” I crossed my arms over my chest and scowled at him.
“It's a pretty safe bet that they're going to kill him, and you all know it!” Alice looked at us with tears in her eyes. “I want no parts of this!”
“No one asked her to have a part in it.” I told Brynna, James, and Elijah angrily. We watched as she huffed off.
“Ignore the little girl, Violet,” Brynna replied, “She is just trying to be heard. After we turn this boy over, are we going to join up with Don’s group?”
“We don’t really have a choice. Even if they guarantee our safety, there’s no way that we can hunt for the rest of our lives on our own.” Elijah looked around us, seeing what the rest of us saw; either the forest was scant in animal population or they were very good at keeping themselves hidden from hungry apocalypse survivors.
“I want to shake Nick, Alice, and Quinn.” I proclaimed suddenly. “They’re a liability, don’t you think?” I looked at Brynna, knowing that if anyone was going to be in agreement that we had to abandon the three kids who were tagging along on our little adventure, it would be her.
“I do not know if that is necessary at this point. They may still be of some use. Until we join up with a larger group, we need as many eyes and ears watching and listening for threats, even if that is all we will get from them. Their fighting skills are archaic, barely above average. Ours have adapted further than I ever could have imagined.” Brynna looked back at the boy tied to the tree. His head was lolling from side to side, resting on his shoulder one minute and then falling forward so his chin touched his chest the next.
“What’s his problem?” I asked.
“While you were arguing with Nick, he tried to run. James and I took him down. He’s a native. He should be easier to handle like this.” Elijah told us as he chewed a piece of grass.
“Get that out of your mouth.” I scolded him.
“I suppose now that we have successfully carried out a rescue mission and intimidated our enemies in combat that Elijah is a cowboy slash super soldier. I find his imaginary world very cute. Surely, a full-fledged paracosm is just around the corner. We may soon find him barking out orders to his imaginary platoon or pretending that he is shooting at train robbers whilst atop a galloping horse.” Brynna smiled at him ruefully. I cracked up, mentally noting how surprised I was to have understood everything she had said.
He pretended to kick her in the leg.
“Actually, I’m just hungry, asshole.”
“Do not refer to me by that disgusting term, you foul-mouthed perversion.” She was only feigning great offense, and we laughed again.
“You're hungry!? We could eat him!” Alice shouted sarcastically to us.
“Go away!” I shouted at her, “If you have a better idea on how to handle the situation, by all means, let us hear it!”
“You sound like me.” Brynna said with a grin.
I fought the urge to smile because I was scowling at Alice still.
“You weren’t attacked by those things. Your sister wasn’t taken by them.” I felt that animal rage that had exploded inside of me as I got out of Miranda’s car that day resurface. “You can barely fight because you’re trying not to change over! We’re embracing whatever is happening to us. The three of you stand no chance against them, but we do. Besides these new abilities, we have him!” I pointed at the boy, “And he may just be the only peace offering we will ever have our hands on!”
“He’s a human being! I mean, he’s not human, but he’s…”
“We have the same abilities he has, and yet he tried to kill us.” I sighed heavily and rolled my eyes. “I am done with this conversation. Keep your poor attempts at debilitating sarcasm to yourself. They make you look pathetically ridiculous.”
“Very nice.” Brynna said to me proudly.
“Thank you.”
She was gently pulling Penny from her chest. I crinkled my brows as I watched their skin separate. Not even a red mark was left behind on either of them. She handed Penny to me, and I turned her sideways to press the skin of her chest to my own. It didn’t attach.
“Alright, nothing too gruesome, if you please.” Brynna said softly to James, who was glaring at the boy in silent fury. “Hey…” Brynna reached out to put her hand under his chin and turned his head so he was looking at her. I watched from a distance as his white eyes changed over to their usual brown at the sight of her. After glancing over her shoulder to make sure Elijah’s back was turned, she stood on her tiptoes to kiss James quickly. I had never seen her in a relationship before, but I knew from watching them periodically over the previous days that she was more than fond of him. It was strange to see that loving side of her worn so proudly on her sleeve. Even as those Pangaean powers began to overtake her Earthly human nature, the humanity that had long been suppressed was growing stronger by the day; it was clawing its way to the surface in a fight for its already significantly weakened life. It was truly strange to witness, after knowing Brynna as being cold and emotionless for so many years.
“Let me do the talking.” Brynna told him.
“I don’t want you talking to him.” James replied just as quietly. “He’s dangerous.”
“Are you suggesting that I cannot take care of myself, James Maxwell?” She asked in a tone slightly more teasing than I would have expected of her.
“Of course not.” He smiled slightly as he kissed her again. “I know very well that you can. Is it such a crime for me to be concerned about you?”
“No.” Brynna shook her head. She was all seriousness now. “It is not at all, honey.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to talk to him?”
“I am sure.”
I looked off to see if Elijah was returning from his trip to the oak-tree-makeshift-bathroom ten feet from us. Sure enough, he was walking back, his hand ruffling the back of his hair as he looked at the ground. He seemed lost in thought but I couldn’t blame him; huge decisions were about to be made and their consequences would be felt for years to come. There was no escaping the magnitude of the conundrum in which we found ourselves.
I picked up a small rock and threw it at James and Brynna.
“Ow! Stop hitting me with things!” Brynna exclaimed, and she rubbed her ribcage quickly where the rock had hit her.
“I’m sorry!” I squealed before covering my mouth, “I was trying to hit your leg!”
“All of these new powers, and you can’t throw a rock accurately? Such a shame but so funny, as well...” James replied jokingly as he looked up at the sky.
“Shut up, James.” I laughed.
“That seems to be a popular sentiment around here.” He muttered, and Brynna and I both giggled somewhat obnoxiously.
“What’s so funny?” Elijah asked when he came back.
“Nothing.” I replied, “James is being his typical self again, so that’s a plus for everyone.”
“Good. You were starting to get kind of Goth on us, man.”
“Are there even still Goths?” I stopped after feeling a quick tug in my heart, “Were there still… never mind.”
“I am going to ask him questions.” Brynna informed Elijah. “I have requested that nothing too monstrous occur. Are we in agreement on that?” Elijah and James nodded, “Alright, then. Come along.”
Brynna turned and walked over to the boy who had just awoken. He was looking around, clearly trying to determine his surroundings.
“You and Penny stay back.” Elijah put his arm out to stop me from walking forward. “You can listen. But stay away from him.”
I nodded and sat down behind a large rock that obscured Penny and me from the Pangaean boy’s view. I could hear perfectly despite the distance between myself and the prisoner. Enhanced hearing was proving to be more and more useful the longer I was able to control it.
Brynna skipped traditional greetings. There were no niceties to be observed with that violent boy. However, in her strategic move to break down his defenses, she did ask his name before plowing ahead with her questioning.
The boy sounded slightly bored when he answered.
“Jonathon,” He narrowed his eyes at her, “I know that your name is something rather strange, is it not?”
“You’re not going to know her name.” James said a little too calmly to be believed. I knew that beneath the surface, his fury raced along with his heart; I could almost hear the rapid beats in my mind.
“Are you of importance to the man who was speaking?”
“I suppose so, yes. He is my father.”
“Your father offered little help as we dragged you from the cave.”
“He was more concerned that his sacrifice was getting away, if I had to decipher the meaning of his apathy.”
“That's why?” Elijah replied. He looked at James and Brynna. “He allowed his son and his sacrifice to be taken. I’m not so sure that we should fear this guy.”
“You should, if you are wise!” Jonathon glared at Elijah. “He is commanded by the One God.”
“The God that was painted on your ceiling in blood?” Brynna asked calmly.
“Yes. The God that bestows us with gifts and miracles is the one to which we were going to sacrifice the girl.”
“So, now what? Now that you did not sacrifice my sister, what is going to happen to you?”
“The others will stand a better chance of overtaking us.”
“You’re giving away this information rather freely. Why are you not hesitating in telling us all of this?” James asked, and his voice betrayed his growing anger now.
“Because you are not our greatest threat. Why should I fear you knowing our secrets? You will soon be dead. We know that a heavy darkness is descending on our lands. You humans will be the first to perish in it.”
“You are well aware that we are not humans anymore.” Brynna told him.
“I do not know what you are, and it does not matter to me.” The boy was getting angry now, too. “If you do not return me to my father, he will kill you. He will kill every last one of the people you brought with you on your vessel.”
“‘The others,’” Brynna said questioningly, “Are they the ones who live in the city? Is my theory correct that you are two separate factions at war with one another?’
“The city dwellers…” The boy repeated in such disdain, I’m sure Brynna was jealous. “All their progression, all their love of new and shiny things, they desert the One God. He will not reward them. I do not know why my people believe that they hold any power.”
“That’s an affirmative on your theory being correct, dear.” James told Brynna.
“Have your cave-dwelling people attacked us before? Have you attacked any of the survivors from Earth?’
“No. You are but a nuisance. When our war with the city is won, we will turn our gaze to you. Then, our world will be pure again.”
“May I ask you something that is rather unimportant?”
“Only if you tell me your name.”
 “Knowing my name will not aid you in any way, Jonathon. Surely, you know that. Here is the prelude to my question: Adam, the leader of the city, informed me that you have studied our kind for ages. Clearly, you hold us in high regard. Now for my question, though I assume you will not answer it truthfully: Where is this animosity coming from, dare I ask?”
The boy was silent.
“Like I said, it is unimportant. If you do not answer, I will say that my question was just yet another instance of me thinking out loud. Though, this next question will interest you, because it concerns your fate: What do you think Adam’s actions would be if we were to turn you over to him?’
I peeked around the wall to see that the boy’s eyes were wide and he was stuttering in his attempts to get his fear under control.
“You cannot… my father will… I…”
“His actions will be violent and painful, we can assume.” Elijah answered for him.
“Are you attempting to make peace with him?” The boy demanded in a shaking voice. “Are you going to trade me so that he will spare your lives? You can give me back to my father, and he will protect all of you. He will not sacrifice the girl. He will protect you! Adam spares no one! You cannot make peace with him!”
“Why are we listening to this? We have the upper-hand. He knows it. He’s trying to talk his way out of this. If we go back to that cave, we’re going to get ambushed.” Elijah informed the other two. The boy's promises were empty ones. They were absolutely impossible for anyone, even him, the son, to guarantee. We controlled his fate, and we had to use that fact to our advantage.
Yet I was beginning to sympathize with him. Seeing his youth up close and musing on his resemblance to kids I might have known on Earth were putting the wheels in motion for my heart to change course. Brynna looked at me, sensing that new reluctance. She walked over and grasped my arms gently.
“You do not have to have a say in this. You can walk away from this decision with clean hands, and I will not think less of you. I know that my opinion of you is not something about which you care greatly, but I wanted you to know that I will not judge you if you choose to stay out of this.”
“How can you say I don't care about your opinion of me?” I asked her softly. My throat clenched when I raised my brown eyes to meet her startling blue ones. “Yours is the only opinion that matters, Brynn.”
She opened her mouth to respond but for once, she came up short on the correct words to say. That’s what I assumed, anyway. But a very small, very naïve part of me believed that I had moved her with what I had said.
She cleared her throat and gave a response after a few short seconds of gathering her many thoughts.
“Either way, I do not want this on your conscience.”
“You would rather me think less of you? I’m not saying that I would. But I might, when we reach the end of this. He’s so young. He’s my age. Do you understand where my sympathy is coming from?” I stopped and chuckled softly to myself. The sudden change in my mood provoked a small grimace of confusion to form on her face. “Of course you understand it. That was a stupid question.”
“I do. I want to do the right thing by all of us. On Earth, the right thing never involved handing over a boy to his family's bloodthirsty enemies. We never would have to trade him when he is perhaps innocent of all the charges we hold to his father. We would never have found ourselves making such a terrible decision. But things are different now. I have told you that before. Do you remember when we saw that horrible film about the end of the world?”
“Yeah. I can’t even remember what it was called now…” I smiled after remembering how Brynna had rolled her eyes and thrown her hands up in exasperation at the stupidity of what was happening in the movie.
“I do not, either. But do you remember how afterward, I told you that I believed the world’s fascination with the end of civilization was prophetic in a way. You were so afraid. You always took all of my rambling beliefs to heart, even the most conspiratorial. Even the most ridiculous. Bringing this memory forward has a purpose. It is relevant to what we are currently trying to decide. I understand the fascination now. We are living free of restrictions, both legal and spiritual. It tells us more about ourselves as people than we ever could have discovered living under law. Instead of some faceless judge deciding this boy’s fate, it is us slamming the gavel, if you will.”
“Do you like it? Do you like having that responsibility, Brynna?”
She shook her head back and forth and puffed on the cigarette that I hadn’t seen her light.
“I never had a desire to play God, Violet Mae. I only wanted to spectate as others tried. I need you to remember that, no matter what may occur from here on out.”
I nodded and studied her face. Her exhaustion was becoming more evident as the days passed. I’m sure the weariness in her eyes was reflected in my own. I reached out and grasped her hand.
“James wants to hand him over.”
I brought up James simply to gauge her level of attachment to him. I was curious to know how deep the bond had forged itself inside each of them.
“Yes, he does. He feels no sense of reluctance to do so, either. He will do anything to keep us safe, no matter how cruel.”
“Are you okay with that?”
Brynna nodded.
“We are two completely different breeds. Men take action with little thought. Women think for ages but rarely act.”
“That’s not true. You’ve acted on impulse quite a bit here of late.”
“That was different. I was emotionally motivated to protect the people I love. Then again,” She looked up at the stars that were beginning to awake for their nocturnal watch over the world, “His motivation is the same as mine. Perhaps my whole theory is ridiculous.”
“Whoa…” I reached out and grasped her hand. “You have never admitted to flaws in your reasoning. This is a big moment. If Hell was still beneath our feet, I would have felt it freeze over through my shoes.”
“Shut up…” She murmured through a small smile. “You are curious about mine and James’s relationship.”
“Well, not curious. When you say it like that, it sounds creepy, like I want intimate details of your love life, or something…” I looked at her, suddenly serious, “Brynna, did you two…”
“That is none of your business!” She exclaimed as she grasped her heart in genuine shock at the question, as though she were a sixteenth-century, God-loving maiden asked for relations outside of marriage by a sleazy, smooth-talking king. I giggled.
“You totally did!”
“I did nothing of the sort…’
“Brynn,” I took her hand again, “I’m not twelve anymore. I’m old enough to know that these things happen. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go mimic your sinful actions.”
She laughed again.
“Do as I say, not as I do. Isn’t that the old expression?’
“I don’t know about old. But it certainly does get thrown around a lot.”
“It is generally used to excuse hypocrisy, which is why I refrain from saying it. Just remember that mine and James’s relationship is to be kept from Elijah at all costs.”
“Of course. He likes him a lot right now. He thinks he’s hilarious. Just let him find out that you two are involved, and he’ll think James is Satan preying on young virgins. I approve, though, Brynna. I know that you don’t need anyone’s approval, but you have mine.”
She nodded and looked at me, still smiling slightly.
“In the same way that my opinion matters greatly to you, yours matters greatly to me. If you ever tell anyone I said that, I will injure you severely, far worse than any Shadow in the woods ever could.”
My heart surged. Brynna had always done whatever she saw fit to do, with no regard for what anyone, even those who believed they were close to her, thought of her actions. Now, she had just admitted that what I thought mattered to her. It was a moment that repaired and strengthened the bond between us. Watching her reckless courage and wishing I possessed a fraction of it had ignited the electrical surge that was pulling us back together. Her gentleness that I had long believed to be permanently dead was beginning to resurface, making it easier for me to see her clearly. My heart still ached for our mother, whom Brynna had heartlessly left behind. I had been so thrilled to find that our father was alive but now, I wished that her cold decision had been reversed. I wished that he had been left to die and our mother had been spared. A part of me even wished Maura had died with him.
“Forget about her.” Brynna told me as we walked back towards the boy.
“Brynna!” I covered my ears like I always did when she entered my mind to read my thoughts, “How do you do that?!”
“When someone has a sudden change of mood, generally going from very happy to very sad or angry, as you just did, their thoughts scream what their mouths will not say.”
“I just don’t want to talk about it. Do you know what I realized?” I said in an attempt to change the subject. “You talk like them.”
“Like who?”
“The Pangaean people. They’re all really eloquent, aren’t they?”
“They are, indeed. Though, I was eloquent long before we arrived here. I chalk that up to my vast intelligence, as you very well know.”
“I know. Or maybe…”
“If you are going to suggest that fate, which is a fallacy, mind you, had anything to do with this, I am going to scowl at you.”
“Okay.” I shut up.
We had reached Elijah and James, who were pulling the boy up onto his feet. Elijah tied his hands behind him with the vine, utilizing his knowledge of knots that he had acquired in Boy Scouts. Apparently, he never forgot the lesson.
“Alright, let’s go.”
“Just take me back to my father. He’ll kill me! Adam will kill me, and then my father will come after all of you!”
“Shut up!” Elijah snapped at him as he walked him forward. “I’ll kill you myself if you don’t shut up.”
“Eli!” I exclaimed in horror. I was truly shocked that he would even suggest mercilessly murdering someone who posed no real threat.
“Just keep walking.” Elijah shot at the boy.
And so we were walking again, Elijah and James leading the struggling boy forward in the direction of the city. Brynna followed closely behind, cradling a still sleeping Penny. I followed her, trying to fight against my stubborn heart that knew what we were doing was wrong. Alice, Quinn and Nick moved in our wake, mumbling about heartlessness and bad decisions.
I almost turned and joined their group.

Part III: The Almighty Split

Brynna

We had believed that we were going in the right direction. I forgave my mistake simply because we had only been on Pangaea for a short while. It was impossible for me to hold myself accountable for not knowing the full layout of the land. The Pangaean boy was by no means going to give us any help. We were walking him to his death, after all.
I was sitting down quietly, watching Elijah as he tried to coax Penny into eating some berries he had found. He had eaten a whole handful the day before in order to discover any toxicity that may have been hidden under their green, scaly skins. Surely, fruit so ugly had to be poisonous. I had given him a long, furious lecture on reckless actions, suppressing my urge to scream and hit him for being so unforgivably stupid. I understood why he had done it. What I was truly angry about was that we had to play Roulette with our lives in order to eat. He hadn’t apologized. He hadn’t spoken at all. He had just let me lecture him on stupidity.
“Stop glaring before you burn a hole in his back, baby.” James told me, and I turned the furious glare he had just commented on to him. “Never mind. Glare all you want.” 
He walked down the fallen log on which he was perched. My anger dissolved as I reached up to wrap my arms around his middle.
“I am running out of cigarettes. I stole several packs from one of the storage units on our first night here. I should have stolen rations.”
“Yes, so we could have witnessed a witch hunt to rival the one in Salem hundreds of years ago. That’s a smart plan, my love.”
I beamed happily as he knelt beside me and grasped my hands. He smiled, too, when he looked up at me.
“I was expecting to get an earful for telling you that your plan would have led to disaster, and you’re smiling.”
“I have grown used to your sarcasm, so sometimes, it will not affect me in the slightest. I am smiling because I like when you call me 'my love.’” I told him softly, “It sounds so medieval, so it is similar to the way I always talk. Plus, the endearment is heartwarming.”
He laughed softly and kissed me.
“My love, my love, my love…”
I laughed now, too, and wrapped my arms around his neck as my lips caressed his. We both stopped, looking over to see Penny still refusing the berries that Elijah was offering her. No amount of begging or lying was going to work.
“Are you going to step in any time soon?”
“No, sir. If he wants to eat potentially poisonous plant life, that is his prerogative.”
“Those aren't poisonous, though. The ones he ate earlier have worked their way through his system by now, and if they were poisonous, he wouldn't still be here.”
“I know. But as punishment for the scare he gave me, he can fight Penny to eat. It is a lost cause. She is as stubborn as I am.”
“If you went over there and told her to eat them right now, she would do it.”
“I know she would. That is one of the perks of my job as surrogate mother: She listens to me.”
“You’ve never told me how that came to be.”
“There is not much to tell.” I shrugged, “Our mother had her in order to fill the void left by the death of my youngest brother. Maura and my mother resented us both. I was young and self-interested, but I knew that I had to put that aside and take care of her. There is a difference between meeting a child’s basic needs and actually caring for a child, as I was very much and still am very much aware. During the time that I raised Penny, I was also chiefly responsible for Violet, who was reaching the age where Maura and my mother deemed her stable enough in her own identity and in her own capabilities to stand on her own. She was mostly left to her own devices, which can lead to trouble for a teenagers. I am very aware of that, as well. See? That is not really much of a story, now, is it?”
“Actually, it is. You rarely divulge details like that.” He kissed my cheek, “You must be succumbing to my charms.”
I laughed and placed my hand on his face.
“That happened long ago, sweetheart.” I stood up after kissing him again, knowing I had shocked him by admitting my enchantment with him out loud. He followed after me, and after catching up, he put his arm around my shoulder. I smiled up at him again.
“I have been meaning to tell you that there is a structure nearby.”
He looked at me in slight surprise.
“How do you just randomly drop that into the conversation?’
“Technically, we were not talking so there was no conversation. But I digress…” I linked my fingers with his and pulled him along. “Come with me.”
I had been out wandering, looking for shrubbery that appeared to be non-life-threatening. I led him to the canal into which I had almost tripped. It was an irrigation system of some kind that was quite advanced, considering our surroundings.
“I was going to follow it but I was not sure if I would be encountering any more natives looking for a sacrifice.”
“Good. Let’s follow it now.”
We were careful to avoid falling into the ditch. It was deep, with steep sides fashioned from dirt hardened by the blazing hot sun. Once, I lost my footing, and if it weren’t for James’s quick hands, I would have gone tumbling down into it.
“Graceful, baby…” He told me sarcastically.
Later, he almost tripped, and I reached out, grasped the back of his shirt in both hands, and pulled him away from the edge.
“Go ahead and say it because I know you want to.” He challenged me in good humor, but I sauntered forward, smiling widely as I walked in front of him.
“It is nice up here on the high road, James.” I told him over my shoulder. I heard him laugh loudly as he rushed forward to wrap me in his arms from behind. He kissed my cheek, and for some reason, I found myself giggling girlishly again. We were currently enjoying rare alone time with which we had not been gifted since meeting up with Alice and Quinn. We both knew that we had a task at hand and that romance would have to wait. But that does not mean that both of us were not thinking about it constantly… We were a new couple, after all.
When I broke free of his arms and walked ahead of him, he reached out, grabbed my hand, spun me around, and pulled me back to him. The maneuver was as graceful as a classic dance step and yet I still yelped in surprise. Just as the sound escaped me, I felt his mouth on mine and his arms locked around me once again. We walked further away from the water ditch; there was nothing that would kill the mood faster than rolling down the steep embankment and slamming onto the hardened earth.
We fell into a soft mossy patch. I started to undo his belt as his lips trailed down my neck and chest smoothly. I tilted my head back, relishing in the feeling of his kisses on my sensitive skin. When I felt his mouth moving slowly and sensuously down my stomach and his hands pulling my pants down feverishly, I struggled to draw in a steady breath but once I had, I managed to moan his name only once. Then, I could only draw in deep, heaving breaths.
His lips were trailing up my inner thigh in an almost cruel tease. On the places where his hands or lips touched, my skin tingled sensuously before sending a scintillating rush of heat to the place where soon his mouth would be.
When his lips and tongue were moving against me finally, it was an almost sinful relief. Instantly, my eyes were closed, and I was running my hands through his hair, breathing in deeply and moaning out his name.
It was while I was clawing the ground beside me and breathing heavily that I began to feel dead eyes watching us. Somehow, the heavy feeling of that eerie presence interrupted the mind-numbing pleasure that James was inflicting on me.
 When I opened my eyes, my furiously beating heart lurched upwards. Before I could even process what was before me, my arousal completely evaporated, and I could only feel a sharply painful surprise that streamed through my veins to every part of my body. That surprise dissolved into icy shock and then, to a horror that almost pulled a scream from deep in my stomach.
“James!” I whacked him harder than I intended on the back. When he did not respond fast enough, I yanked his head up by his hair that was still clutched in my hand.
“Ow! What?!” He asked. But after looking up, his eyes immediately fell on what I was seeing. He jumped up and pulled me with him so that I was cradled in his arms. I allowed myself just one second where I squeezed my eyes shut and burrowed my face into his neck.
“Alright, we're going to go. It's okay, baby.”
I rolled out of his grasp and landed on my feet. The sight before us paralyzed me; all I could do was stare in utter terror and repulsion. Vaguely, I felt James pulling my pants up again.
“Honey, I want to go.” My voice betrayed my fear as did the way my entire body shook. “James, I don’t want to stay here.”
Rows upon rows of bodies were hanging from the trees, their eyes and mouths opened wide in a silent scream that would never be heard. I held James’s hand to my chest, stopping him from walking forward when he went to observe the bodies more closely.
“It wasn’t being hung that killed them. That’s just for show. Look…” He pointed at the body that was closest to us.
I had been so distracted by the morbid way the woman's head was rested sideways on her shoulder that I had not noticed the contents of her abdomen hanging from a gaping, still-dripping wound. My body lurched forward abruptly. If I were to vomit, it would simply be the physical, tangible manifestation of the scream to which I was refusing to give life.
James had not realized that I was going to be so thoroughly sickened by the sight of that woman’s mangled body. I had handled everything else so efficiently, with not even a hint of any kind of emotional distress. After calling my attention to the true atrocity of what we were witnessing, he knew that he had inadvertently frightened me.
“Baby, I’m sorry.”
I shook my head and closed my eyes, struggling to suppress the nausea churning my stomach in sickening gyrations. He rested both of his hands on my face and kissed my forehead.
“There are so many of them...” I whispered in a trembling voice, “James...”
“I know. Come on, we'll go. You're alright. We're both alright. Can you walk, sweetheart?”
I nodded vigorously but clutched him tighter when he released his grip on me slightly.
“I have to start taking care of myself again, James.” I muttered with my eyes still closed. I needed to change the subject in order to keep the angrily bubbling bile down where it belonged. “You are spoiling me with your attentiveness and your care.”
“This is spoiling you?” He cupped my chin, raised my head, and pressed his forehead to mine. “This is what you consider spoiling?”
“Indeed. It is an amazing albeit unfamiliar gift. You are the only one who has ever gotten this close to me.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere.” He assured me for perhaps the hundredth time. It did not matter how many times he said it. Every time was a new reminder, a new breath of life to resuscitate a slowly dying idea. 
“I know very well that you’ve spent your entire life taking care of yourself. But you need to understand and accept that it’s alright to let someone else carry your weight for you. Don’t tell yourself that you need to start pulling away. Don’t do that again, Brynna.”
His words held a soft plea that I had not heard before. He had teased me on my never-ending urge to run from him and all he represented. He had been both infuriated by that tendency and profoundly hurt by it, as well. Now, he was expressing indirectly that he could not stand for us to be apart again. I looked up at him and put both of my hands on his face now.
“I do not want to leave you, honey. The fact that I have made it this far is astounding. Trust me, you should be patting yourself on the back for hanging in this long. We have been through the worst things that any living beings can experience, and we have gotten through them together. Do you agree?”
“Of course I do. I never would have been able to get through this without you. And I even count your condescending, pain-in-the-ass side, because that got me through, too.”
I smiled and stroked the stubble on one side of his face with my thumb.
“Only because you were picturing all the quiet places on the ship or on this planet where you could possibly kill me?”
“Not kill you, no.” He replied with a teasing grin, “But definitely use my Jedi mind powers to make you trip over your shoelaces or something similar.”
I laughed and hit him lightly in the chest. After standing on my tiptoes to wrap my arms around his neck, I turned my face to him and breathed in his intoxicating scent. Our bathing options were limited. In fact, they were nonexistent on most days. Still, James smelled as seductively wonderful as ever.
“Can we go?” I asked, “I feel like they just watched this entire conversation.”
“You’re afraid of dead people hearing you confess that you have feelings, too?” He replied.
“I am afraid of dead people, period.”
We turned to walk away, abandoning our search for the building from which the irrigation system stemmed. Nothing threw off a hunt for shelter like finding bodies hung up and slashed open in the trees. Just as we began to walk away with our hands clasped together, we jumped at the sound of a loud bang behind us. Immediately, we whipped around, our eyes white in cautionary alarm. We were ready for a fight.
We were never given a chance because when we turned, a spotlight that illuminated the darkness of the forest blinded us. I covered my eyes, only to feel two pairs of hands grabbing me.
“No!” I threw my body forward and flipped one of the assailants over my shoulder. The other let go and backed away as he realized that I was rounding on him to attack.
I stopped before the fight even began, though. I recognized the face of the man who had grabbed me.
“James, stop.” I looked over to see him repeatedly punching another man in the face. He released his iron grip on that one's throat and watched him crumple to the ground. Then, he walked back over to me.
“Are you with Don Abba?” I asked the boy. He was trembling terribly and holding up his hands in surrender. “Do not stand like that. You have not seen half of what we are capable of. You are betraying your weakness.”
The boy immediately put his hands down.
“You’re his daughter, aren’t you?”
“No. My father is the obnoxiously power-starved man with the gray hair who believed that he  was fit to be ruler of the campsite.”
“No, not his daughter…” He gestured with his head towards James, “You're Olivier's daughter.”
“I suppose you could call me that as it is factually accurate. It's accurate biologically, anyway. In terms of sentimentality and non-literal connotations of the word, though...”
“Brynn...” James said behind me, and I shook my head slightly, rerouting my mental course until it was back on track.
“You are human, aren’t you? Your thoughts clearly show human tendencies.” I was speaking gently, noting that he was carrying a double barrel shotgun. If I frightened him too severely, I would be shot, and no level of superior powers would heal a wound from a gun that size.
“How do you know…”
“Just relax.” James instructed him calmly, “We're all on the same side here, okay? You startled us. That’s why we attacked your friends.”
“We saw you from inside. We thought you were from here.”
“You thought we were Pangaean?” I asked, and he didn’t respond. The poor young man was shaking so severely that if he were not talking clearly, I would fear that he was succumbing to a seizure.
“You don’t want to go in there, Ms. Olivier. They’re not friends of yours in there. They don’t like you because you’re his kid.”
“Well, I do not like him. I am as disgusted by him as the rest of you are. Just take me to Don. I will explain the situation.”
“No, you don’t understand. He’s… he’s…” The boy trailed off, turning white as the threat of losing consciousness became evident to him.
“You have nothing to be afraid of, sweetheart.” I assured him as gently as I could.
I felt great sympathy for that poor boy. He was younger than Violet, and yet he was sent out with a gun to dispatch a threat. I wondered how many of those unfortunate souls hanging in the trees were killed by that young man who was clearly in over his head.
“What is your name?”
“Andy.” He answered, and I watched as tears welled in his eyes. “I don’t want to do this…”
The conversation we were having should have been all the warning James and I needed to hear in order to convince us that we should turn back. But our need for community was driven by our survival instinct. We could not responsibly continue to trek along on our own, not after Penny had been taken. Our fellow survivors were our only chance.
“Alright, Andy. You do not have to do anything that you do not want to do.” I looked at James and tried to convey what I was thinking. Somehow, I was able to manage it, because he nodded in response to my silent question. “We have a prisoner. We stole him from a large group of natives that live in a cave a few miles back.”
“The cave people are bad. That’s what Adam said.”
“You have spoken to Adam?”
“Don joined up with him. That’s why there are…” He pointed at the bodies, “They aren’t just other survivors. Most of them aren’t. But some of them…” He pointed at the bodies closest to us but did not actually look at them, “Those three… They were in my housing compartment. They slept right next to my dad and me…”
James and I were silent, looking at the three bodies. Andy was wiping at his eyes as tears escaped before he could stop them. There were no gentle reassurances I could give him; in fact, there was nothing to be said at all. So, I returned us back to the reason why we had come, for the sake of all of us.
“We need to speak to Don.”
Andy nodded and wiped his eyes quickly. He wanted to erase any indication of his emotional outburst. I assumed that Don would not take kindly to one of his “soldiers” breaking down into a fit of guilt and regret. I gently clasped his arm, surprising myself with that moment of kindness. No non-family member had ever witnessed my caring nature, which barely existed in silence let alone in visible action.
“I’m Brynna, but I am sure you know that.” He nodded, “This is my…” I trailed off, not knowing how to describe James still despite how far we had come together, “This is James.”
I had to forgive myself just once for taking the easy way out of a conversational conundrum.
He looked between us and smiled ever so slightly.
“Anyone from Earth is alright with me. After all of this…” He shuddered slightly, “Come with me. I’ll take you to Don.”
***

We were led by Andy to a towering wall made from smooth, old rock. Vines slashed their way across its surface so that the whole structure camouflaged into the surrounding forest. After walking several feet, Andy pulled back a particularly thick patch of vines that held beautifully shaped pink flowers.
“Don't let them fool you.” Andy told me as he used his knife to pull back the vines. “The second you touch them, they shoot a barb from inside straight into your eye. If you manage to avoid that, they get you with this weird white smoke that kills you in seconds.”
Without even addressing exactly what he had said, I looked at James.
“Do you think Penny...”
“No,” He held my hand to comfort me, “Her instincts will stop her, sweetheart. Besides, I doubt there are any more around here...”
“That's not true, actually. There's a whole tree where they grow around the trunk about a quarter mile from where we're standing.”
“Let's not talk about that.” James said firmly, and when I went to continue, he grasped my face and shook his head to warn me against speaking further on the subject of Penny, Violet, and Elijah.
A door meticulously fashioned from old stones was revealed to us once Andy had safely moved all of the vines away with his knife. A small window at the top of the door was pushed open, and an eye appeared; it looked between the three of us in slight alarm before the door swung open without a word from the mysterious gatekeeper. In fact, when we walked through, we did not even see him. When I looked up the long, dirt path we were to travel, I saw at the end a colossal Gothic mansion that had to be as old as the planet itself. It was in that house that Don and his people had taken shelter.
I surveyed the grounds, noticing that people were busily farming on either side of the path. I did not know exactly what they were growing, but I did note that two men sat in chairs on both sides, lazily observing the work being done. My brows furrowed, and I looked at James, finding my own confusion reflected in his eyes.
“How big is this place?”
“The house or the grounds?” Andy asked quietly. His gaze was diverted to the ground so he could easily avoid looking at the people working.
“Both.” James and I answered simultaneously.
“The house is bigger than any Hollywood mansion back home, I can tell you that. It’s big enough to house all of the people who came with Don.”
“And the grounds?”
“They stretch on for miles. The ground is really fertile, Don says, so we’re planting our own stuff. We’re all responsible for feeding ourselves, but some has to be given to Don and his people…” He trailed off, perhaps sensing that this information was not meant to be divulged so freely.
“Cool. Thanks.” James said in an easy tone that was meant to let Andy know discreetly that it was alright to end the conversation. I squeezed his hand. He was proving to be an invaluable asset in those complicated situations that always seemed to be cropping up; those particular moments that I could not squirm my way out of were as unwelcome as weeds in a lavish garden but luckily, James was there to keep everything cut and polished.
“I have a bad feeling.” I whispered to him almost inaudibly. I pointed to my chest quickly. “Something ominous is lurking, James.”
James shook his head and turned mine so that I was looking at him.
“You have nothing to be afraid of, Brynn. I promise.”
“James, this just does not feel...”
“I know. But I've got you, sweetheart.”
That was all the reassurance I needed.
Andy pushed the door open, and a torrent of cold air that smelled of dust and ruin rushed towards us. I huddled closer to James, though my need for a closer proximity to him had little to do with the chill in the air. There were more people in the corridors and huge, sprawling rooms of the mansion. They were busy pulling vines down that had invaded the house and covered the walls from outside. Some were even patching windows and floorboards. I watched two kids a few years older than Penny as they swept the floor, giggling softly all the while as they observed James and me.
Besides being slightly disturbed by witnessing that instance of child labor, I was pleased to see that there was no gender divide; both men and women were cleaning and farming. I had no idea at the time why I cared about something so incredibly trivial, but the reason would become apparent later. In the moment, I chalked it up to the unapologetic feminism I had always embraced as long as I had known to have an opinion on the matter.
When we reached the top of the creaking staircase, Andy led us through a corridor lined with chestnut walls and white doors. As we walked, the maroon rug that ran the length of the hallway coughed dust up from under our feet. I sneezed four times, trying to stifle the sound by covering my mouth but still, it bounced off the walls in an endless echo.
“Bless you for the rest of the day.” James said quietly after my fifth sneeze.
“Thank you.” I muttered after wrapping my arms around one of his to avoid holding his hand. He did not share my mild germophobic tendencies but still, I wanted to be courteous at the very least.
Andy raised a shaking hand to knock on the door before us. He cast his eyes downward once again when a male voice instructed us to enter.
Don Abba was certainly not what I was expecting. Though I had been informed by Nick that he was a humble man with little to say, I still expected one who led a group of terrified survivors to be terrifying, himself.
James was of a decent height, but he certainly was not gigantically tall, where I had to possibly suffer a neck injury each time I looked up at him. But the top of Don Abba’s head barely reached James's chin. There was a certain alarm constantly present in his large blue eyes; they darted from me, to James, to Andy, and back again in record rapidity. After all he had seen and experienced in order to safely bring those for whom he was involuntarily responsible there to safety, I could forgive his skittishness. His hands shook as they spun a feather quickly over his fingers. He was clean-shaven, leading me to assume that they had devised some kind of shaving technique. Perhaps they even had some method of showering.
“Hello.” He greeted us softly as he rose to his feet slowly. “You’re from Earth. I remember you two, especially. You were the brave souls willing to walk out into the unknown before the rest of us cowards. You were the very first to volunteer.”
There was not a hint of irony in his voice. I could not help but smile slightly as I shook his outstretched hand. His modesty and honesty were refreshing even under the uncertain circumstances.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I am going to inform you that I am Daniel Olivier’s daughter. My name is Brynna Olivier.”
“I am well aware that you’re his daughter. I’m also well aware that you don’t share his ruthlessness.”
I suppressed a small chuckle. Perhaps I did not willingly starve people as a means of population control. Perhaps I would not cause even the slightest harm, either physical or emotional, to my offspring. But I certainly was ruthless in my own way.
“This is my…” I put my hand on James’s arms but stopped short once again when I attempted to come up with the right term for what James was in relation to me. I did not want to frighten him away by proclaiming anything too serious. I did not want to insult him by downplaying whatever our relationship was to him. I tried again, hoping the appropriate term would just come tumbling out when the time came for it to be spoken. “This is my…”
Nope.
“Boyfriend.” James answered for me, and he was smiling slightly in sarcastic triumph as he shook Don's hand, “James Maxwell.”
“Yes,” I positively beamed and grasped his arm, “Boyfriend.”
“Very nice to meet you both. Don Abba.” He replied, still in that barely audible voice. But there was genuine enthusiasm present in his tone. He indicated the two intricately designed leather chairs in front of the polished wooden desk behind which he was taking his place again. “May I ask how you found us? Before you answer,” He held up his hand and looked behind me, where Andy was still standing. “Andy, would you kindly bring these two something to drink?”
“Thank you.” I muttered awkwardly. We were both reaching the point of dehydration where the symptoms began to slow the body down. We certainly needed all of our wits about us now because though Don Abba was not physically threatening, he had many in his house who were. The feeling of unease was still stabbing at my insides, and we could not afford to let our guards down or be unable to fight if Don suddenly turned on us.
“So, you were telling me how you found us.”
Neither of us had given even the beginning of an answer, actually, but I chose not to call his attention to that. In order to appear cooperative, I answered without a fight.
“We found you because we were looking for you. We have been traveling through the woods for days now.”
“Yes, you escaped the campsite after your father very rudely informed you that you would be traded to Adam. Adam is the…”
“We know who he is.” James informed him crossly. The slight mention of what my father had proposed left him reeling and enraged, not only because it was atrocious, but because he had not been expecting it at all. I reached over and grasped his hand when Don looked away, and a stream of his thoughts bombarded my mind; there were many expletives and gruesome threats of violence promised for the next time he saw my father. 
“It’s alright, baby.” I whispered, so quietly I was unsure if he heard. He continued to stare straight ahead, his eyes ablaze with animal rage, but his other hand came to rest over mine, and after a minute, he pulled my hand to his lips and kissed it quickly. The gesture was not just to comfort me; it was an apology, for not being there, for leaving me when I needed him. 
“You do know Adam?” Don sounded slightly shocked as he jotted something down with the feather.
“Oh, it is a quill…” I mused out loud. I had been slightly bemused as to why the man was carrying around a feather.
“Yes,” He smiled slightly, “I have to keep track of what we’re doing here some way, don’t I?”
“I do not know what you are doing here, but I am going to say yes to the query you just posed to me.” I was looking around the office. The light outside was having trouble breaking through the thick clouds; the room was lit only by the slightest glow from the guarded late-afternoon sun.
“How is it that you know Adam, exactly?” We both stared at him, feeling threatened by his inquisitiveness. He looked up at us and smiled warmly. “Just curious.”
“We had to go to the city in order to save my sister. She was attacked by some creatures in the woods.”
“Which creatures?” He asked, “We’ve encountered quite a few. We’ve lost several people to the various things that are in those trees.”
“Adam called the ones that attacked her ‘Shadows.’”
“Oh, they’re the worst!” Don replied sympathetically, “Six of my people were killed by them a couple of days ago. They walked right into their nest. I didn’t know that Adam could heal people injured by them.”
A woman entered the room with a silver tray bearing two hollowed-out coconut shells filled with liquid. James and I took them and looked at each other warily. These people really had gone above and beyond in deciphering how exactly they were going to survive. They were completely self-sufficient. Still, there was something not quite right about the situation…
“Your sisters and your brother escaped with you, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” I nodded and swirled the liquid around in the shell.
“Are they alright? Why aren’t they with you?” I looked up to find that his eyes had widened in alarm once again.
“They’re fine,” I assured him calmly before changing the subject. “So, you have aligned yourself with Adam.”
“Yes, I have. He has offered to help us with our problem, and in return, we will help him with his. That’s the deal, anyway. Who knows if he’ll honor it?”
“What exactly is your problem that you’re dealing with?” James asked in a tone that challenged Don to lie, if he so dared.
“We don’t see eye-to-eye with the other group of Earth survivors, James. Adam has offered to help us rectify the situation.”
“Rectify it how?” James pressed, and I glared in his direction to warn him without words not to push the man too far, lest we wish to overstay our welcome.
“We want to get rid of them. Originally, your father decided to form his own group. The natives took out most of them. They would have gotten him, too, if it weren’t for us. But we weren’t going to allow him or his people to stay here, so he left.”
“Where did he go? With the Bachums?”
“Yes. And they took him in with open arms, as I’m told.”
“How very Godly of them…” I muttered irritably. I rolled my eyes to the heavens that I was currently criticizing.
Don laughed softly.
“I can gather that you don’t quite see eye-to-eye with them, either. The reason why we want them gone is because Adam will grant total safety to only one of us. It will either be the Bachums or me. We are trying to round up the survivors who chose neither group, though there are few left alive, sadly.” He was silent for a moment, studying us as he attempted to gauge our reactions to that most chilling news.
“That's terrible.” I said, just to offer some response.
“It is. It's also very unfortunate that we should have to resort to such barbaric measures in order to live here safely. But this is Adam’s world. He determines how things run. He decides how it all turns out.”
“You mean to tell me that he’s proposed this epic war between you and the Bachums, and yet he’s helping you? Forgive my morality, but isn’t that cheating?” James asked somewhat derisively.
“Perhaps. But it’s also a fair trade between myself and him. His people hate the cave-dwellers. They say that they are stuck in the past. They won’t move forward with the times.”
“Is that why they tried to sacrifice my five-year-old sister?” I leaned forward slightly in anticipation. I needed to hear his answer.
“Yes. They believe that in order to be pious one must also be heartless. If they want to appease their God and keep their lives and freedom, they have to follow a very bloody and violent interpretation of their creed.”
“Adam told you all of this?” I was shocked that he would divulge secrets to a different breed so readily.
“I told him if he wanted my help, then he needed to be honest with me.”
I nodded, surprised again by Don's boldness.
“You were inside the cave?”
“Yes.” James and I answered.
“Then you saw their painting on the ceiling, I’m sure. The Four-Armed God?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what he was holding?”
“There were symbols. Yeah, we saw them.” James answered.
“They symbolize the four great powers bestowed on the people we call the natives. Apparently, for the first several hundred years on Earth, we had those powers, too. Now some of us are regaining them. We’re evolving, but in a way, we’re also moving backwards in time. Does that make any sense?”
“Is that why he’s so strong now?” I beckoned to James. “Is that why I can see these things before they happen and hear other people’s thoughts?”
“Yes. That’s why you can fight like wild animals. It’s all an evolutionary tactic that had been rendered inert by our civilized lives on Earth.”
“Oh.” I muttered. I ran my fingers through my hair and then placed my face in my hands for a minute of quiet processing. It was far too much information to take in at once. My ability to think was not aided by my desperate need to eat and drink. A headache was rumbling painfully in my ears as it tightened around my forehead and ran with heavy feet down the back of my neck.
“Are you alright?”
“Drink this, baby.” James told me softly, and I felt the coconut shell being held to my lips. He tilted it back, and I drank two gulps of the most amazingly sweet coconut juice I had ever tasted.
“Oh my God…” I muttered.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Don replied with a slight grin.
I nodded and took another drink. After I had swallowed, I spoke again.
“So, why are only some of us changing?”
“Because we’re embracing it, Brynna. Do you want to know something else that’s shocking? Prepare yourself.”
“I am prepared.” I answered instantly.
He paused, forcing me to mentally prepare for another bombshell. I just wanted to know what he was going to say. I was sick of dramatic, soap-opera-style breaks in conversation.
“We will never die.”
I stopped breathing at the words. James had taken a huge gulp of coconut juice and was choking on it now.
“I told you to prepare yourself.”
“We’re… immortal?” I exclaimed in incredulous shock. I was unsure why the thought brought forth such a potent fear in me.
“Immortal, ageless…” Don filled in airily. “Do you enjoy being young and beautiful?”
I looked at him quizzically, feeling slightly put off by that random and personal question with such heavy implications behind it. Or perhaps I was imagining things. I felt quite dizzy.
“I suppose.”
“Well, then, you’ll be happy to know that you will look the same forever. You won’t age another day, either of you. Any of you, I should say, because your sisters and brothers are…” He furrowed his brows when he looked at me, “Where did you say they were?”
I shook my head back and forth rapidly, trying to be discreet about my fight with that sudden onslaught of dizziness. If we wanted to stay there, he had to believe that we were all able-bodied enough to work, and if I passed out, he would assume that I was afflicted with some illness that rendered me anything but.
“I did not say.”
“Brynn…” James muttered to me as he went to stand up. I looked over just as he fell to his knees, holding his head.
Oh, God or Gods...
Disregarding any wisdom or common sense, I jumped up onto my feet only to feel the ground sashay right out from beneath them. I hit the ground hard before turning over onto my back to stare up at the ceiling. The dancing stars and pools of black and silver that had become so familiar to me during my descent into drugged sleep on the ship were back. I had been drugged again, this time completely against my knowledge and will.
“Her sisters and brother are out there. They’re close.” Don’s voice was still as calm as ever, as though he was simply commenting on the weather on any old day instead of standing over two people who were struggling to remain conscious after he had drugged them for no reason that was evident.
“James!” I cried out.
 My heart resumed its fearful, quickened march. I hated any kind of sedation. This time, it was so much worse because I had not been able to stop it… It had been against my will, just like the very first time back on Earth…
I only heard James spit out three words in fury after he had reached out and grasped Don’s ankle to stop him from walking further away where he would not be able to hear him.
“Let… her… go…”
The long-clawed hands that were the darkness of deep, unforgiving sleep grabbed hold of me and dragged me into the unknown depths more merciless than that of the river in which we had almost drowned.
Pull for the surface, Brynna, my mind screamed in a plea too desperate to ever be spoken aloud by me.
It was useless. The hands were too strong. I collapsed onto the floor.
The already dim light faded away.
***

“LET GO!” Violet was screaming desperately. I kicked and fought for the surface, trying to break free from the serpent that was pulling me into the depths of the dark water in which I had become completely submerged.
“BRYNNA! BRYNNA!” Penny’s terror was yet another monstrous water-beast that was wrapping me in the iron grip of its tentacles.
“NO! PENNY!” Violet again, but this time her tears were choking off her words. I had to break free of the haze, of the waking dream I was stuck in to save her. I had to get to her and Penny. There was no knowing what Don and his people were capable of doing.
“Just listen to me, listen…” Quinn’s voice, begging shamelessly for an audience and a chance to explain. It was useless.
“Where is she?!” Elijah was furious as he demanded the details of my whereabouts and an assurance that I was, at the very least, still alive. God or Gods bless him.
“Hey, she’s coming out of it. Don!” An unfamiliar voice belonging to a young man who had just realized that I was not nearly as unconscious as I appeared to be... My mind had risen up for one brief moment to alert itself that Elijah, Penny, and Violet were near.
The coconut juice, as sweet and pure as any endless dream, rained down my throat in a flood more dangerous than its delicious taste would have me believe.
I fell back into darkness.
***

“Brynna? Brynna?”
At first, I believed it was James. My eyes snapped open, needing to see his face, needing to know that he was there. When my vision focused, though, disappointment, and admittedly, a shot of fear broke over me; it was Don seated in front of me.
I jumped, ready to attack him for what he had done. He had mentioned something about embracing our powers, and I certainly had. I was going to show him just how ready I was to utilize my new killer instincts by ripping his throat out. How dare he drug James and me? How dare he steal Penny, Elijah, and Violet away? How could he strike such fear in their hearts without reason? How dare he keep me here so that I could not absolve that fear for them?
Once again, my hands were cuffed behind my back. I wondered where they had procured the cuffs but prayed that they had stolen them off one of my father’s thugs in a bloody fight that ended in said thug being no longer of this world. Dare to dream, I suppose. My mind was racing through more thoughts than what could have been possible to process at once, and yet there I was, processing every last one.
“Yes, I’m sorry about those.”
“Do not fret.” I muttered in a voice quiet not from fear but from physical weakness. I stifled a yawn. Whatever drug they had slipped into our drinks had drained all the energy that I had left. My deep, sedative-induced sleep had done nothing to remedy that exhaustion.
“I still have my feet.” I told him as the yawn burst forth despite all efforts to suppress it. “If you come any closer, I will kick you squarely in the face.”
“I don’t doubt it. I won’t be coming any closer. Would you like to talk?”
“About what, dare I ask?”
I ordered my racing heart to slow. I would not show fear in front of him or anyone else. Doing so would accomplish nothing. Instead, I would start negotiating. Blubbering like a three-year-old frightened by a shadow in the closet was going to render all my points moot. A man would not negotiate with a woman who cried. He would simply look down on her for dissolving into a display of weakness he would never know, for his breed was different.
Strange thoughts…
“Where are Penny, Elijah, Violet, and James?” I demanded first. Despite asking such an emotionally heavy question, I kept my voice as emotionless as possible. Remaining calm when asking whether or not the members of one’s family are even still alive is quite challenging, as I am sure you can surmise.
“They’re alright. They’re just down the hall from you. Given the current climate between ourselves, the cave-dwellers, as you call them, and the Bachums, we’re lucky to have these cells below the house. Adam told me that they were used for these same purposes hundreds of years ago, during yet another war between himself and the Old Spirits. That’s what they’re called, officially.”
“I want to see them. I want to see that they are all alive and unharmed.”
I was in no mood to learn any new information for the first time in my life. Nothing he was saying mattered to me. The only thing that mattered was knowing that they were safe.
“They are. Well, your boyfriend isn’t. He came out of his sleep early, just as they were cuffing him. We had to take him down.”
My heart erupted in a fiery, volcanic explosion that replaced my blood with burning, agonizing lava. They had killed James. Oh my God, oh my God…
My eyes must have been bugging because Don leaned forward, shaking his head vigorously and wearing a look of great concern.
“Oh, sweetheart, no; he's not dead. Of course not! We don’t hurt those we don’t have to hurt.”
I could not suppress it; I sighed in relief.
“I apologize for the misunderstanding. I can hear your heart racing. That really frightened you. May I ask you a question, just to satisfy my curiosity?”
I did not respond. I was still reeling from those brief yet incredibly painful moments where I had believed that James was dead. I had not known where to begin grieving, even. I hated the man in front of me for even mistakenly leading me to believe that I had lost James.
“Do you love him?” He asked before I had been given a chance to refuse his question.
I stared at him, stunned by the brashness of what he was asking. I did not understand how he could believe that intimate details of mine and James’s relationship were any business of his.
“I only ask because I find the pairing strange. No judgment.” He held his hands up and smiled disarmingly. “But he is much older than you. He probably graduated college before you were even born!”
“Not that it's any of your business, but our age difference does not matter now. It never did, but it especially does not now, given that we are immortal. At least, you proclaim that we are immortal. Or was that some intricate, lucid dream I had after you very rudely drugged me and my much older boyfriend?”
“I did say that. It’s the truth. But you still haven’t answered my question.”
“Why do you even care?” I demanded, and my aggravation leaked through my facade of calmness. “It truly is none of your business, wouldn’t you agree? What do my feelings for James, at any degree of intensity, have to do with you?”
“I told you that I’m just curious.”
“Well, I am going to stick with my original answer, thank you so much. It is none of your business.”
He smiled slightly.
“That’s never a good answer, Brynna. It implies shame, in this case at your relationship with a man so much older than you. It sometimes denotes that one person’s feelings aren’t as strong as the other’s, if they are there at all. So, is it you who doesn’t love James when he loves you, or the other way around?”
“It is neither.” I replied icily, “It is none of your damn business.” I wanted him to be angry at my resolve not to answer him, but he merely smiled and studied me closely again.
“We could use someone like you around here. You’re worthy of knowing our secrets.”
“I have no interest in your secrets, nor would I ever work for a man who resorts to assault and murder in order to gain a place in the world.”
“James said something about you being so mature, but that was perhaps the most idealistic, youthful thing I’ve ever heard, especially given what you’ve witnessed.”
That insignificant excuse of a man was attempting to belittle me. As he laughed somewhat hysterically at what I had said, I forced my rage to remain level. I focused only on obtaining the answers that I so desperately needed.
“You have spoken to James?”
His laughter subsided, but he ignored my question.
“You’ll see things my way, Brynna. You’ll see that my actions are the result of not having a choice. It’s either us or them.”
“Did Adam ever explain exactly why it is that we all cannot live here together peacefully? Do not roll your eyes at me like I am some wide-eyed, empty-headed flower-child, Don!” I snapped at him loudly. I had stunned both him and myself with my outburst, as it was the direct result of the fact that I was truly, dangerously angry.
“You want to know the reason why he won’t allow all of us to share his planet? We can’t. All of that conflict on Earth led to so much destruction, not to mention the end of the world as we knew it. He can’t risk that here. This place is pure. That’s why it’s called Purissimus. I can’t imagine destroying this world like we destroyed ours. Can you?”
I did not answer. He continued, undeterred, as though he had not asked me a question at all.
“If we destroyed this place the way we destroyed Earth, it would be terrible. It would be an abomination. It would be absolutely horrible to commit the same crime twice, don’t you agree?”
This time, his large eyes met mine. I could see his resolve staring powerfully back at me; he would not continue our conversation unless I answered him. Because I was desperate to find Penny, Violet, Elijah, and James, I did not hesitate in replying.
“Yes, I do. But you cannot tell me that there are no ways for us to live here together. Send one group to the north, one to the south…” I sighed in frustration, “I do not know! I never intended to follow in my mother’s footsteps. I would never have been able to solve disputes between countries. I cannot solve this one here. But violence is certainly not the only answer.”
“You’ve almost been killed by them, and yet you still sympathize with them?” He was incredulous at the strength of my heart. He was in awe of it. I was not flattered.
“I do not generalize an entire group of people based on the violent actions of a few. Also, I do not finish battles that were started by others for reasons I do not know.”
“Perhaps not. I can see that you're not keen to the idea of fighting, which is perfectly fine for now. Your conflict resolution skills might need some toning up, but let me say this: your mother wasn’t able to solve any disputes, domestic or foreign. She was very good at starting them, though, wasn't she?”
I did not answer once again. I scowled just at the thought of her.
“Now, I'm drawing a blank on your mom. I can't place her appearance at all in my mind. Is she the red-headed woman who with your father?”
“No,” My expression darkened even more at the mere mention of Maura. “And I will not talk about her.”
“About the woman with your father, or your mom?”
“Both.”
“Does that other woman bear a resemblance to your mother?”
“No.” The anger was bubbling up, threatening to boil over. I forced it down, trying to picture something, anything that would suppress it. Penny’s smiling face came into my mind; the mental sight of her beautifully youthful happiness absolved my anger but brought forward new fear and sadness in me. I wanted so desperately for her to live a safe and happy life. It had always been my intention to ensure that Penny lived a wondrous, carefree childhood, unblemished by any of the horrid things I had experienced as I grew. She would always have my love, when I had not had anyone’s. She would remain innocent and naïve for the duration of her youth because I would never allow her to see the cruelty or sickness of evil men. She would never know regret or pain. I would spare her from all of the most unspeakable things of the world even if such never-ending protection cost me my own life.
Racing thoughts again. Focus, Brynna.
“I was almost killed by Adam’s people.” I changed the subject. It was the perfect way to erase those unpleasant memories and recollections.
“But Adam is on our side now. He won’t let you forget that. He will show you how good it is to be on his side, Brynna. Plus, you were also almost killed by the Old Spirits, too. You took one of them hostage.”
“Where is he?” I asked, though I barely cared.
“We delivered him to Adam. He is very grateful.”
“I am sure he is.” My heart dropped. What I felt now was the sting of regret on which I had mused briefly but had not expected to actually experience. Was that boy going to be another body hanging in the woods to warn enemies away from Don's stronghold? I could not bear the thought of sending a young man to his death. Although, if everyone truly was immortal and ageless, I had no way of knowing exactly how old he was. His aging might have stopped hundreds of years earlier, for all I knew.
“He would like to speak to you, too. Would you like to see him now?”
“No. I want to see that they are all okay. The longer you stall, the more I am beginning to believe that you have done something to them. I want to make sure they are alright.”
“For the sake of the one God, Mr. Abba, let the young woman see her dear ones.”
It was Adam’s voice. He was entering the room with the same effortless charm and predatory nature of the Serpent who had targeted another man sharing his very same name. He moved behind me, sending a chill that twisted around my spine like two rough hands wringing a rag dry.  After kneeling down behind me, he freed my hands. I could feel his eyes watching me.
I jumped up and turned abruptly to face him. It was all his fault. We would have lived peacefully in our campsite until the day we ran out of food. We never would have known any of that violence if he had not attacked us so senselessly.
I spun around and lunged for his throat. I was stunned that he did not stagger back a single step after I had run into him with every bit of strength left inside of me. His hands came up and lazily peeled mine from around his neck. I prepared myself for a physical blow that never came. He merely chuckled and held my wrists lightly to my sides.
“There is no need for that, Ms. Olivier. I would not hurt you even if you had chosen the other side.”
“I have not chosen any side!” I actually stomped my foot to show the frustration that had been building inside of me for the previous half-hour of conversation with Don. I could not stand not knowing if my family was alright. I wanted to beat in the man's head for even allowing me to question whether they were safe or not.
“Even if you do not realize it, you have chosen a side.” Adam's smile widened, and his eyes gleamed maliciously.
“I have not done anything of...” I trailed off when my brain began to turn pirouettes once again. “God or Gods, what is wrong with you people?!”
I put my face in my hands as I swayed on my feet. Adam reached out to steady me. At first, I shook him off, but then I had no choice but to allow him to hold me upright.
“Just take me to them.” I ordered weakly and immediately, he turned me to face the door.
“Can you walk?” His voice was gentle as his arm wrapped around my shoulder. I nodded; even if I could not, there was no way I was allowing him to carry me.
He let me take a few cautious steps before he tightened his grip to ensure that if my knees were to crumple out from beneath me that I would not hit the floor. With every step, my mind cleared just a little bit more.
“Now, please do not be alarmed by his appearance. He is going to be alright, I promise you.” Adam was still speaking gently, as though he was soothing a screaming child. I glared at him as he opened the door.
James was sitting, handcuffed to his chair, facing the doorway. His head was rolling from one side to the other as his eyes did the same in their sockets.
“Oh, my God…” I managed to gasp out as I rushed forward and knelt in front of him. “James?” My hands were on his face, “James! Honey, wake up.” I shook him carefully, noting that his face was bruised severely, and there was blood dribbling from one side of his mouth. The next time I spoke, I was not shocked to hear my voice break. “James, please wake up, baby!”
I pressed my forehead to his, fighting the tears that so desperately wanted to fall. Perhaps I would feel stronger if I just allowed a few to leak out.
No. I needed to remain defiant. I could beg for James to come back to me through frenzied, quickened, suffocating breaths, but I would not shed a tear.
“Did… they… hurt you?” His voice was so weak and low, I believed I had imagined it. I leaned in when he repeated himself.
“No. I am alright. Look at you, honey…” The crackling in my voice made him open his eyes.
“I’ll be fine.” He was trying to raise his voice above a whisper for my sake. “Have they said anything?”
“Too much has been said. It would take too long to repeat it all. What matters is that they do not intend to kill us, which is a plus, surely.”
“Indeed, it is.” He nodded and looked into my eyes. I put both of my hands on his face again before kissing him for a long, tender moment. “Don’t worry about me, baby. I'm tough; I can handle it.”
“I am worried about you. Beating you up was unnecessary.”
“I was ready to kill every one of them to get to you. It was necessary, or else they’d all be dead.”
“I know,” I pressed my forehead to his again, “They have Violet, Penny, and Elijah. They have Quinn, Alice, and Nick, too, but I could not care less about that.”
“We need to stick together now. We need to start caring about them. They’re just kids, baby. We need to start watching over them a little more.”
“I sincerely doubt that any of them desire our protection. They are much too proud, which is admirable. It is also very convenient for our sake.”
“I’m being serious.” He told me as I wrapped my arms around his neck and rested my head against his chest. I was comforted by the sound of his heart beating steadily. He was truly in no danger of succumbing to his injuries. “I already feel a little better, sweetheart. I felt better the minute I saw you.”
“Yes, because the sight of my greasy, matted hair, dirt-covered clothes and body, and smeared makeup has rejuvenating powers to rival Adam’s.”
He chuckled weakly and kissed my forehead.
“Yeah, it does.”
I squeezed him a little harder and closed my eyes, wishing that I could fall asleep there with my body against his, listening to his heartbeat all the while.
“That is a very sweet thing to say, though I am sure that you are exaggerating slightly.”
“I'm not, actually. Your ability to downplay yourself never ceases to amaze me.”
I changed the subject quickly.
“Don asked about us.”
“Did he now? I am shocked that he would so nosily pry into our business.”
I ignored his sarcasm.
“He is puzzled by our relationship. He does not understand what a young woman like myself would be doing with someone your age. He asked if I love you. It was quite random and aggressively forward of him to ask such a thing. It is no business of his.”
“What did you say?” James asked, and I pulled away to look up at him.
“Your curiosity is driven by your own need to know my feelings.” I accused him softly, “This is not the time or the place to discuss such things, James.”
“You’ll have to forgive me for wanting to know.”
“You are the only man I have ever met who actually cares what I am feeling.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“No. It is just interesting. Confusing, also, and you know how befuddlement does not suit me at all. When the time is right, I will tell you where I stand on the matter. Just know that I am very fond of you.” Looking into his bruised face that was still so handsome despite his injuries, I was urged to say more. I allowed myself to indulge my heart’s desire to express my feelings, even if just for a moment. “I adore you. I depend on you more than I have ever allowed myself to depend on anyone, and that is comforting, James. It is comforting to know that someone else is willing to care for me. I have done that myself for so long without complaint. That is why I say that you spoil me.”
“That’s not spoiling, Brynn. That's what is supposed to happen. It’s normal. It’s right.”
“Perhaps so. But it is as alien to me as the planet on which we are walking and the situation in which we currently find ourselves.”
“Our situation?”
“I was referring to both our relationship and the current conundrum with Adam and Don. They want us to stay here. I do not know why I feel such a reluctance to do so. They are offering us shelter, protection, food…” I looked at him, “It will be good for Penny and Violet to be around other people. It will be good for us, too.”
“To be around other people?”
“Yes, because we will be protected. I read his mind. He will allow you and me to live together. There will be no judgment, no chiding about our relationship. Of course, I do not care about that.”
“Nor do I, baby.” He closed his eyes after I embraced him warmly again. He burrowed his face in my hair and kissed my head. “You smell so good.”
“So do you.” I smiled brightly, “Do not ask me how that is possible considering that we have been living a life free of soap and shampoo. We have been bathing in streams, for the sake of all deities and Gods.”
He chuckled softly again.
“What?”
“I love that one. That’s one of your more famous Brynna-isms.”
“Brynna-isms?” I repeated through a giggle.
“That’s what I’ve been calling them mentally.”
“I like it.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I laughed as he moved forward with difficulty to kiss me. I closed my eyes and returned his kiss, feeling my heart fluttering madly in the way that I had become accustomed to experiencing. I had never understood how so many great writers could toil endlessly over love and all its counterparts. Hate I understood. Loathing was a motivator, driven by its God, Anger. But love seemed so trivial, so meaningless. I agreed with Maura who said that it was a “bloody waste of time.” Now, I understood what all the fuss was about. I could write endless pages on my feelings for James, which I would not acknowledge openly as charging dangerously close to the border of love. I shuddered to think what I would feel when I hopped over that invisible, mental divide.
I pulled away when a bitter, gnawing cold filled up my insides. Maura’s others words, so unwelcome, were echoing through every dark room corridor of my mind, which only a second earlier had been blissfully empty as James kissed me.
“They will trick you with their wiles, my dear. They want to make you weak. They prey on women to make themselves feel like men. It is all a play for power and control, for total dominance.”
“Tell me,” James whispered gently, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I shook my head, begging the warmth to return. It had been so serene, so divinely perfect. I should have known it would not last. My wise wariness of men was beginning to rear its hideously deformed head as my feelings for James grew.
“You have all the power over it, sweetheart,” James's eyes met mine, “You make the final decision.”
“I know. James, if you knew the full details of everything, you would not be so surprised.”
“I’m not surprised. I’m not upset. I understand, Brynna.”
“I know.” I nodded, feeling tears welling up in my eyes again. I wanted to love him. I wanted the defenses I had built so tediously for many years to crumple into nonexistence. I wanted James. I needed him. And he was right, I knew. Only I could decide whether or not I would advance our relationship. Only I could decide when to shut those protectively cynical voices down for good. Those beliefs that had a mind of their own were actually mine, and I could eradicate them if I found the power to do so.
“I should not be asking for your patience anymore.”
“Stop.” He kissed me again. I moved closer to him and kissed him back, “We have all the time in the world, baby.”
All the time in the world... That reminded me. I pulled away so I could look into his eyes. In my own, he saw that tremendous and dreadful fear that I could not sufficiently explain.
“What? What is it?” He asked as he tried to reach forward to grasp my face. Then, he remembered that his hands were still cuffed behind the chair in which he was sitting.
“He told me we are immortal.” I answered softly, “And we have stopped aging.”
“That’s…” He laughed softly to brush off the ridiculous notion, but in his eyes, I saw that he knew it was true with just as much certainty as I did.
“It is what everyone wants, isn’t it?” I asked with a slightly bitter laugh, “Every living creature, human or otherwise, is afraid to die. Yet here we are, wondering whether the gift of eternal life is right. We are not sure if we even want it.”
“It’s too much to think about now. Jesus, Brynn…” He muttered incredulously, “That was a bombshell and a half.”
“I know.  I should have given you a warning. I am sorry.”
Don appeared in the doorway behind us.
“So, what have you decided? Good, you’re awake, James. How do you feel?”
“Seven of your people beat the shit out of me while I was still too drugged up to win the fight. How do you think I feel?” James asked, and I watched his eyes turn red.
“Relax. Look at me.” I had both of my hands on his face, “We need to let this go, baby.”
“I’ll let it go.” James told me loudly enough so Don could hear. “But you don’t want to know what I’m going to do if it happens again. In a fair fight, those seven guys would have been nothing by the time I was done with them. Let me remind you, too, that it took seven of your best people to take me down. Keep that in mind, Don, if ever you decide to pull that shit again, but especially, and you better listen and absorb every last syllable of this, especially if you put your hands on her again!”
“I don’t doubt any of that, James, what with your newly acquired strength. No one will be trying to hurt you, her, or the other kids again. That is a promise.” Don was slightly rattled by James's threat, but he plowed forward with the conversation, trying to keep things upbeat. “So, has Brynna told you what I have offered?”
“Shelter, food, community. Yeah, she told me.”
“And what have the two of you decided?”
“We don’t really have much of a choice, do we?” James spat at him, “It’s either stay here and live, or try to make it out there where there are natives and Shadows around every turn, amongst other things. Let me ask you, what do you think our decision is?”
“James…” I raised my eyebrows, warning him without words that we needed to make nice with those people, despite how sickening it was. I certainly was not going to grovel, but I was not going to complicate the situation with animosity and obvious aggression, either.
“Alright,” He barked at me somewhat more angrily than I expected, “I'm done.”
“I’ll go get Robert. He has the keys to your handcuffs.”
“Thanks, honey!” James called after him sarcastically.
“Hey…” I grasped his chin lightly and spoke as sternly as I could when he switched into his angry, disdainful mode. I found it very entertaining when said anger was not directed at me. “If we want to stay here, you are going to have to play nice with the big kids on the playground, lest you wish to get sand kicked in your face. And do not snap furiously at your girlfriend, lest you wish for celibacy.”
He could not help it. Despite his irritation at my suggestion, he laughed.
“You know I don’t wish for that. Not in the slightest. God, I’ve had a really hard day, and you’re threatening me with that? What are you? Oh, right; you're a monster. That's what.”
I giggled again before returning to the topic at hand.
“I am serious, James. We need to try for peace with these people. I do not trust them as far as I can throw them, especially since they have teamed up with Adam. But we need to stay here for our own safety. We are both proud to a fault. We need to suppress our urge to be vain and just go with the flow, as they say.”
“Baby, this is…” He stopped upon seeing the disapproving look on my face. “Do you really want to do this?”
“I do not want to. I just know that we have to. I will tell you the details of my conversation with Don at a more convenient time. Right now, you will just have to trust me when I say that we need to be here.”
He was still frowning when he nodded, but when he kissed me again, I knew that his dismay and irritation were not directed at me.
“Only for your sake, my love.”
I beamed brightly at the endearment and pressed my head to his chest. He rested his own on top of mine, and I closed my eyes, knowing that he was reluctant to stay but so thankful that we were. We were going to keep one eye open when we slept, surely. But at least we did not have to worry that natives would cut our throats in the middle of the night. We could handle the humans easily. We were evolving, and most of them were not.
I could not help but believe that we had the whole situation under control at last. However, believing was very different than knowing, I had discovered.
I knew that the danger was still evident around every turn. I knew that if there was ever a time to run, this was it.
What I don’t know is why I didn’t.
***

Violet, Elijah, and Penny were not handcuffed. When I entered each of their rooms, they hugged me, asked if I was alright, inquired about James’s whereabouts, and then expressed their desire to leave and never return.
“We’re staying.” I told them when we were all together in a group. Violet, who had been embracing James, turned to look at me, eyes wide in surprise.
“What do you mean, we’re staying? Brynn, they dragged us out of the jungle in the middle of the day, they threw us in cells…”
“Yes, they were very untoward. They were not kind. However, we all know that trekking through the jungle is unsafe. Our experience in the cave was enough of an indication. It was more than a fair warning. We need to stay here with other people who can protect us, if need be.”
“We were doing fine protecting ourselves.” Elijah spat angrily, “We’re evolving. Most of the people here aren’t, I'd be willing to bet.”
“Wasn’t this always our endgame, though?” James chimed in to help me out, “Weren’t we headed here to begin with?”
“Yeah, before the monstrous squid-shark experience, we were headed here. That should have been enough of a sign.” Violet crossed her arms over her chest, closing herself off to any further reasoning. I was still going to try to explain whether she was open to hearing the logistical details behind my decision or not.
“I am aware that we are all upset. But they are offering us a place to stay. Everyone works around here, so we would have to be alright with that. But we will have a supply of food, constant shelter, and there is strength in numbers, like we have always said.”
“Look, Brynn, I can see why you think this would be a good idea.” Elijah told me after a moment of pondering all I had said. “But there was no reason for them to drag us out the woods like that. We really thought that they were natives, and I almost killed one of them.”
“Well, clearly they are not that offended by your violent outburst because you are still standing here.”
“I don’t trust that guy.”
“It’s not Don that I don’t trust.” Violet disagreed, “He’s nothing. He’s not a threat at all. I mean, look at him…”
We all turned to observe Don, who was talking quietly to Adam. I did not listen in on their conversation because I knew that Adam would sense it. I had already experienced the mind-numbing pain he inflicted on those who rudely eavesdropped.
“He’s nothing,” Violet repeated, “It’s that other guy. What did you say his name was?”
“Adam. But you need to remember that he saved your life when he certainly didn’t have to. Because of that, we should at least try to trust him.” James told her.
“James, they beat you up. How can you not want to do the same to them?” Violet changed tactics quickly; she was now appealing to his ruthless pride. Smart move, Violet Mae…
His expression darkened suddenly at the mention of it. I grasped his hand in mine and linked our fingers together. He looked at me and softened immediately. I smiled at him before looking away.
“Your sister is right,” James told them, “We don’t have a choice. We have to stay here.”
“They know that we’re changing over.” Elijah told us, “I heard two of the guards talking about it. I understand that we need to be part of a group, but I don’t think that aligning ourselves with people who hang their freaking dismembered enemies from trees…”
“That is enough.” I snapped at him. I looked down at Penny, who held my other hand even tighter at the mention of the poor souls left to hang in the woods. “You didn’t see that, did you?”
She shook her head and wrapped her arms around my middle. I patted her head comfortingly.
“You are angry that they dragged you here. I understand that. I am not exactly thrilled about it, either. But I also understand that despite what they have done, they are our best chance of surviving.” I sighed heavily, looking up for divine guidance to help me determine how best to make them understand. As usual, I was offered no help, at least not by a higher power.
James rescued me from the conversational stalemate as he always did.
“It has been a long, violent fight. Every day since we’ve been here, we’ve been fighting something. Natives, Shadows, cave-people, monstrous squid-sharks…” He looked between Violet and Elijah, “The list will go on the longer we stay out there. Who knows what else we’ll see? Who knows if we’ll continue to survive? At least here, we have a chance. We might not see another fight ever. Is there anything else that we could possibly ask for, given the circumstances?”
Elijah and Violet were convinced by what he had said. They still distrusted the situation as James and I did. But they knew he was right. I wanted to hug him in thanks for convincing them, but I also wanted to roll my eyes in annoyance that was only partially serious. Why was it always James who was able to convince people? We would have to compare notes on the fine art of debating a course of action.
“Now we need to tell Quinn, Alice, and Nick that we are staying.” I heeded James’s request that we keep them close. He looked at me, and I nodded before speaking again, “I might not agree, but it is important to you.”
“It is.” James responded, and I could see that he wanted to kiss me to show his gratitude for my agreement. But Elijah was there with us, so instead of a kiss, I got a quick squeeze on the shoulder. “I don’t want to see them get hurt after everything we’ve survived.”
“I know. I am starting to agree with you more and more on that, believe it or not.”
“Or not.” He responded sardonically, and I swatted him lightly in the arm with a suppressed smile forming on my face.
“Well, I don’t agree with that at all!” Violet exclaimed after crossing her arms again, “We don’t need them. You two don’t need any more responsibility. We were just saying that you two are leading the way and doing a damn good job of it.”
“You thought that was a good job?” James asked incredulously, “I shudder to think what a bad job is.”
“Speak for yourself, James Maxwell. I personally believe that we were doing a stellar job.”
“We nearly got eaten by a prehistoric river serpent, we almost drowned in said river, we were attacked by…”
“Thank you!” I pressed my fingers to his lips to stop him from continuing.
“Whatever your own opinions of it are, even Quinn, Alice, and Nick said that under the circumstances, you guys are doing a good job.” Elijah added.
“Oh, so you all have spoken? That is nice.” I replied honestly, “That will make convincing them to stay much easier. I was picturing a slippery, one hundred and seventy-nine degree slope.”
“I talked to them.” Elijah corrected me, “Violet is still mad that they left us to fight by ourselves in the cave.”
“Forgive me for being slightly put out by an obvious show of cowardice.”
“Alright, Brynna…” Elijah snapped sarcastically, “I wasn’t getting on you about it. I was just telling her what was going on after they disappeared.”
“I just don’t think that you two need to be responsible for three people who wouldn’t throw water on us if we were on fire. That’s all I’m saying.” Violet held her hands up in defense.
“I would not go that far. Surely, if all was known, and there was a sense of immediacy, not to mention the guilt that would follow watching someone burn to death…” I started.
“Oh my God, Brynna!” Violet threw her hands up in frustration now.
While Violet was clearly at her wits end from hearing so many of my overly logistical musings on things, James and Elijah were both laughing hysterically after that particular one.
“You think I am being funny, but I was just pointing out a fallacy…” I continued seriously. I sighed heavily and walked forward, heading towards Adam and Don. When they turned to me, I shuddered upon meeting Adam’s eyes. There was a depth to them that I had not noticed before. It was downright unnerving; the icy chill of his gaze shot clean through my own and burrowed deep inside of my mind, where it could see all and know all, even the things I had kept secret for so long. I looked away from him immediately and spoke to Don instead. Standing next to Adam, Don was about as threatening as a guppy swimming alongside a great white shark. I looked between them, trying not to smile; the simile was very fitting, actually.
“We have decided to stay, though as I have stated, I do not believe that we have much of a choice.”
“Of course you…” Don started soothingly only to be interrupted by Adam.
“You are right, as always, Ms. Olivier. You did not have a choice.”
“Adam, I don’t think that making the girl feel imprisoned is helpful in making her want to stay.”
“I would not have let you leave, because there are many out there who hunt you. There are creatures that hunt any living food source, of course. But they are the least of your worries. Did Don inform you that Richard Bachum and your father have a bounty on your head?”
I was momentarily stunned into silence, which more than answered whether or not Don had told me.
“It is of little importance now that you are here. You needn’t worry. You are safe behind these walls. You can fight like an animal if you venture out and they attack you. You have a strong man who feels great affection for you and will protect you.” His eyes darkened when he looked at James, and I could have sworn I heard a note of disdain in his voice. “And of course, the Bachums and your father fear crossing me.”
“I am not worried,” I lied, “Nor am I confused. Nor am I surprised. The Bachums will cross you because that is the arrangement of your war, is it not, Adam?”
“They are not crossing me if they continue to fight. They are crossing Don.”
“What exactly are they offering as a bounty? Is it only me that they are after?” I pressed him.
I had to know how to process the notion of being hunted. I needed to know the exact reason behind their desire to capture and kill me, because it could become a weapon if any situation called for one.
“They are offering safety. They are offering an exit from the war that is starting as we speak. They are offering an abundance of food and royal standing. For what more could any of you ask?”
“I am going to assume that you were being condescending when you said that, and I am going to ignore it for the time being.” I crossed my arms in indignation, reminding myself of my younger sister who was standing the exact same way as she watched us. “Is it only me? What is their reasoning?”
“Their highest bounty is for you. But they are also hunting your sisters and brother.”
“Do they want us dead or alive?”
“With you, preferably alive. With the others, certainly alive.”
“Adam, I don’t think this is right, telling her all of this…” Don chimed in. We both scowled at him, and he shrunk into the background where he did not speak again.
“What about James?” I asked.
“They want him dead.”
I almost grasped my heart as the icy fear took a strangling hold of it once again. I suppressed the urge.
“And their reasoning?”
“Does it matter?” Adam asked me after raising an eyebrow.
“It matters to me.”
Adam chuckled softly, nodding in a show of respect for my need to learn all that could be known. It showed great wisdom and an embrace of common sense. That is what his mind was saying, anyway. For some reason, he was allowing me to see into it, though his many thoughts were hazy, like trying to see into a mirror after throwing water on the glass.
“You all have been gifted with great powers that we also possess. Each of you has been given at least one. They do not take kindly to being rejected by the One God they follow so closely. They do not blame Him. They blame you.”
“Interesting…” I mused on that for a moment.
“They know that those who embraced their powers will be more likely to win their place here. They do not like being usurped. They certainly will not allow a total victory. They certainly will not surrender.”
“May I ask you something?”
“You are going to ask me whether I agree or not. I can sense your stubbornness and your aggression.”
“Well, I am not going to apologize for either.”
“I would never expect you to apologize, Ms. Olivier.”
“This is truly a rare opportunity to get inside the mind of a tyrant.”
“You believe I am tyrannical?”
I furrowed my brows and stared at him. My silence and the look on my face answered his question. He chuckled softly again.
“Continue, Ms. Olivier.”
“Why is it that we cannot all live here? Why do you insist on one group eradicating the other?”
It was a question that had been tugging at my consciousness since mine and Don’s discussion. Now, I was faced with what was perhaps the only chance to have it answered. I needed to know just for my own mind. I could not see the answer clearly the way I could see other things.
“That will become evident to you soon enough.” Adam replied, and our eyes met again.
He reached out his hand to me. Once I clasped it, he brought mine to his lips. As he kissed the back of my hand, he never broke his gaze away from my eyes.
“Your stubbornness and aggression will persist most boldly in my mind until we meet again, Ms. Olivier.”
I blinked, and he was gone.
***

Elijah knew about James and me. When two women were asked by Don to lead us to our rooms, I was not careful or quiet when I disclosed to them that James and I would be sharing. Elijah narrowed his eyes at me, and I shrugged.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked him softly.
“Can you come with me, please?” He grabbed my arm and pulled me away from our group before I had a chance to tell him that I could not.
“Are you serious right now?” He was clearly trying to keep a hold on his anger and disapproval, though I could not imagine why. I was more than capable of dealing with both.
“This does not have to turn into anything drawn out. Perhaps I was wrong in keeping mine and James’s relationship status a secret. I should have been open with you from the start. I do apologize.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“You just asked me if I was serious, and now you are asking…”
“Don’t even pull that right now!” He exploded suddenly and pointed at me in rage. “You and him? Brynna, are you out of your mind?!”
“No, Eli, I am not.” I replied calmly, “I am twenty-two years old and fully capable of deciding with whom I want to be involved in a relationship. I have decided on James.”
“He’s like…” Elijah threw his hands up as he tried to settle on exactly which exaggerated number he was going to use to define James's age. I stopped him before he could speak it.
“He is forty-five. I am not going to spend even a moment justifying our relationship to you. I certainly do not have to do that, therefore I will not. I don’t care whether you approve or disapprove. We have been together officially for several weeks, but I know that you had to have noticed how we were even before then. There was always an attraction.”
“I did notice it. I noticed that he was attracted to you, and it disgusted me. That’s why I called him on it the first night I met him.” He told me as he shook with fury. “He’s preying on you! You’re young enough to be his kid!”
“He has done nothing predatory throughout the entire duration of time that I have known him. He is a good man. He has one eye out for me constantly. He would do anything to make sure that I am safe.”
“Is that what this about? Feeling safe?” His tone softened only slightly.
“No. It is about the fact that when I look at James, I see a brave, humorous, painfully good-looking man who cares deeply about you, Violet, Penny, and me. That is why I am with him. Because I…” I stopped, knowing that admitting to Elijah the true level my feelings for James had reached would only make him angrier.
“I’m not going to approve of it, Brynna. I will never approve of it!”
“What, are you our father now?” My anger rose instantly at his assumption that I needed or even wanted his approval.
“No, I’m not. Thank God! But I am technically the man of the family now, and I don’t approve of him!”
“You had no problems with him only a moment ago.”
“That was before I found out that he dates girls half his age! That he preys on girls too stupid to realize they’re being played! What if I started dating someone who was half my age?! What if I started dating a twelve-year-old, Brynna?!”
“First of all, that is an utterly ridiculous comparison. What you suggested would violate several old-world laws. This is not a matter of James dating me while I am too young to fully grasp what we are doing. I am an adult, Elijah! Secondly, it is folly to accuse me of stupidity. I mean, really! It is utterly nonsensical to assume that I would ever be enchanted into foolishness by a man!”
“Yeah? It happens to the best, doesn’t it? Look at Mom! Look at Maura!”
“And now you have offended me further by comparing me to them!” I exclaimed furiously, and my eyes turned red at the mere suggestion that I, for better or worse, was similar to Maura or our mother. “They are certainly not the best of any breed, human or otherwise! What occurs between James and I has nothing to do with you!”
“You know, I get it now.” He was grinning with a sadistic rage I had never seen in him. He was going to say something cruel, something unforgivable. I braced for it.
“Go ahead. If you want to have that look on your face, then you say it, Elijah.” I challenged him in a dangerous whisper.
“This is all about Lucien, isn't it? And Dad.”
To what he was referring exactly escaped me somehow. Lucien's death and my relationship with James possessed no commonality to one another, I believed.
“You're with him to punish yourself for letting our brother die, right?”
My stomach turned over. I almost heaved forward as the assault of memories overtook my consciousness. My anger spiked as his words lashed their way through my stream of thoughts. How long had he floated in the water before I emerged from my stupor? Had he screamed my name? Had he called to me so desperately for help? Had he thought that I was purposely ignoring him so that he would die?
That particular thought was the one to send me reeling into a space of temporary insanity.
I ran my fingers through my hair and closed my eyes for just one second as I tried to control the high-speed train of my consciousness. I wanted to scream again and stomp my feet until that terrible question faded away. There was not even a tiny part of my brain that could bear it. I could not imagine, even for a moment, that he had thought I was allowing him to drown for some selfish reason...
My sweating palms slid off of the table in the hallway that I had tried to grasp in order to steady myself.
None of those obvious signs indicating that what he had already said was enough stopped Elijah from continuing.
“You’ve got your Daddy issues, and he’s old enough to be your daddy. Christ, Brynna, you’re such a cliché!”
“Shut up, Elijah…” I warned him, because my hands were beginning to shake, and my vocal chords were being strummed roughly by my desire to start screaming the most vile, hateful things I could possibly think. 
“He probably tells you all the things you want to hear about how Lucien died. He's old, so he's desperate to keep you. He'll say anything. Any normal, young guy wouldn't be able to look at you knowing that you killed your own...”
I would not have stopped myself if I could have. I slapped him so hard across the face that he slammed into the wall and left a dent in the plaster. He ran through a list of expletives that were meant to make me sorry but failed. I glared at him, wanting to hit him again and again until every last bone in his body was broken. Even in my cruelest moments towards Maura, my mother, or even my father, I had never said anything so agonizingly cruel. How could my brother, my protector, say such terrible things? I couldn’t fathom it.
Holding onto the anger while forcing away the hurt, I stormed away and opened the door to my room. There, I found the man who had caused the great conflict. Elijah followed after me, shouting still about my promiscuity and stupidity, though those are terms too nice to put in the place of what he actually said. He yelled about my ignorance and malicious self-interest that had resulted in our brother's death.
 James was standing at the window, and he turned upon my entrance into the room.
He was outlined by the bright moon that had come up over the tree line. A shadow was cast over his face, eerily complimenting the anger I could see in his eyes. If his thoughts were any indication, and obviously they were, he had not heard the details of mine and Elijah’s fight. He knew that it involved him, but he had tuned out the arguing to give me privacy.
My eyes were ablaze with rage that I would not allow to dissolve into pain. I refused to cry, even in front of James. I would hold onto the anger because it was more honorable than admitting to being hurt. I needed something to distract me, some way to release the poisonously incensed energy coursing through my veins. My blood was on fire, burning through every part of my insides with no mercy. I would surely melt from the inside out.
When James looked into my eyes from across the room, he saw both the anger I wore proudly on my sleeve and the hurt I was trying to suppress. He sensed my need to release both in a frenzied action. Animals can sense desire in other animals. It was no different for James and me; we were becoming more animalistic with each passing day.
“Come on, then.” He challenged me, and I attacked.
I ran forward, jumped into his arms, and wrapped my legs around him to hold on. We fell onto the mattress made of feathers, kissing frenetically, as though our very lives depended on that moment between us. James and I had been fighting the desire to sneak off into the woods to do exactly what we were doing in the present. Now, there was nothing to stop us, and fury to drive us forward.
Our hands were ripping at our clothes as the scorching anticipation reached its maximum level. I had never experienced such painful desire. There was but one cure for the hunger from which James and I were suffering. There was but one way to exorcise the fear, regret, and uncertainty that had been plaguing us since we had walked off the ship that very first day on Pangaea.
I did not gasp in shock or feel any fear at all that second time. I was safe there, encased in his strong, muscular arms. With the same rabid intensity of his kiss, James pulled my hips forward. My back arched as I grasped the soft animal fur beneath my body on the mattress. Because I knew that no one was near enough to hear, I moaned loudly as I reached up, wrapped my arms around him, and clawed his chiseled back.
I yelped in surprise when he pulled me to him, lifted me up off of the strange bed and slammed me into the wall. Our profusely sweating bodies ground together, and he panted into my neck as he thrust harder and faster. There was nothing else in the world that mattered. There was only him and me. There was only that tortured longing between us that was being rectified in the most carnal way. There were no other feelings that mattered besides the feel of his tongue moving against mine and his full length filling me perfectly.
I broke free of his kiss so that I could bury my face in his neck.
Because I was vastly inexperienced with sex, I was unaware of what orgasms felt like when they were the result of sex with a man. The first time with James, I had been self-conscious, albeit very slightly, and extremely nervous, so I had not had one. But this time, as James thrust into me, I tightened my arms around him as I felt a quickly growing, warm heaviness building deep within me. 
“James…” I gasped, “Oh, my God… James, I’m going to…”
I buried my face in his shoulder to try to stifle the volume of the moan that I could not suppress.
“Oh, my God… It’s… happening!”
Even in the “heat of the moment,” we’ll say, he still laughed. 
“It’s okay. Just let it happen, baby.” He told me, and he kissed me quickly, “Are you okay? Do you want me to st…”
“No!” I exclaimed, before moaning out, “Oh my God, no…”
I thrust my hips forward and moaned even louder, and when it finally did happen, I tried but failed again to suppress the loud cry of absolute ecstasy. Every part of me felt warm and relaxed, even though my legs were shaking, and my arms were still locked around his neck. I was so drained by the intensity of what had just occurred between us that I couldn’t worry about how many others had heard, though I assumed it had to have been every resident living in the colossal house.
He held me as we both breathed heavily. Somehow, he managed to force his legs to walk back to the bed. I knew that after what we had just done, my legs simply would not cooperate with the command to walk. As a matter of fact, my brain might have forgotten what walking even was, however briefly.
James propped himself up on his elbow, only to become so entranced by me lying completely undressed before him that he had to lean in to kiss me from my neck, down my chest, and down my stomach. I felt that rush of warmth between my legs as his hands ran up my thighs slowly.
When his lips traveled back up to meet mine, I could not help but smile.
“Feeling better?” He asked me with a grin, “I know I am.”
“Yes, I was afraid your severe injuries would leave you feeling less than up for ‘we-are-safe-hooray’ sex.” I told him, deadpan.
“That’s what I thought this was. I’m glad we were on the same page, dear.” I was lying beneath him, looking up into his brown eyes that never failed to allure me. I giggled at his own deadpan response. He laughed softly, too, as he took my hand and pressed it to his lips.
“You were amazing.” He was completely serious now.
“So were you.”
“Yeah? I try.”
“You succeed.” I put on hand behind his head and raised my own, pulling him closer to me. His arm came around my back so I could rest my head against it as I kissed him. When we stopped, I could see in his alluring eyes that he was going to ask me what had been discussed between Elijah and me.
“Do you want to talk about it?” He asked, proving me right.
I shook my head.
“But I know that I should.”
“You should. We always knew he was going to disapprove. Let me guess; he said I was prowling on you, right?”
“How did you know?”
“That’s exactly what I would say if the situation were reversed.”
“Well, it is ridiculous! I am more than mature enough to handle a relationship with an old man such as yourself…” He chuckled at that, and I could not suppress my own smile after seeing him laugh. “It is ridiculous of him to assume otherwise. Not to mention, it is none of his business.”
“Well, he’s your brother, baby. He’s worried about you. He thinks that you’re allowing yourself to be blinded by love...” He trailed off but returned to the conversation quickly with his typical lighthearted sarcasm in tow, “Or like, or fondness, or whatever it is that we’re calling this these days.”
“Ha-ha, I know you are trying to jest about this in order to lighten the mood. I don’t care what Elijah thinks. I do not appreciate that he attributed our relationship to a trauma from my past. He had the nerve to suggest that I only find you tolerable simply because you lie and coddle me, and because I have ‘daddy issues.’”
“He said what?!
Oh, God or Gods…
“James…” I sat up slightly to put both hands on his face. “Honey, there is no use being angry about it. I am not even upset.”
He knew that I was lying, but he forced the newly born anger inside him to disperse quickly for my sake.
“I should kick his ass from here to next week.” James told me with a dark scowl.
“No!” I grasped his face even more firmly, “That will accomplish nothing, and despite my disbelief that he would say such a thing and despite my anger, he is still my brother.”
“You don’t deserve for people to treat you this way, Brynna.” James told me firmly, and his eyes rose to lock on mine again. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, James. That does not mean that I can stop them, though, now does it? He was angry. I know that now…” I stopped, not believing a word of what I was saying in regards to Elijah.
He sensed my lie and called me on it immediately.
“No, you don’t. You don’t have to defend my honor to him or anyone else. I don’t feel weird about us being together. I don’t feel any shame in telling people about it.”
“Neither do I!” I told him honestly, “I don’t know why people are getting all bent out of shape about it.”
“Because it’s something to talk about. In Elijah’s case, he thinks it’s right to object because by the old world standards, our relationship would be considered very weird. He also thinks that he’s protecting you from me. I'm sure that he really does believe that you're with me just so I'll coddle you, and because of your issues with your dad, as you said. But how he can blame you for what happened...” He stopped and clenched his jaw in anger. When he continued, his voice was quieter from his effort to suppress that fury.
“Several people blame me for that, James.”
“I don't know how anyone can blame you for what happened to him after what happened to you!”
“Elijah and Violet know absolutely nothing of that, and I intend to keep it that way, James.”
“Why? So they can keep blaming you for something that never could have been your fault, even if that hadn't happened?”
 “I will take their anger, resentment, and pain over their pity, James. You know that to be true. You know the full extent of what happened with my godfather?”
“I do. You told me.”
“I didn't tell you. You already knew.”
“Yes, but you've discussed it with me.”
“The reason why I discussed it with you is because I knew that you wouldn't pity me. I knew that if you and I were going to enter into a relationship that I needed to be honest with you. When I began to pull away, you deserved to know why. You needed to know that the reason why I am afraid of intimacy is because of him.”
He grasped my hand.
“I would never hurt you that way, Brynna. Not like he did. Whatever his name is…”
“Michael. His name was Michael. He was Maura’s husband. Because of that, and because he was my father’s best friend, we called him ‘Uncle Mike.’ He worked overseas for my father, and when he came home, he lavished all of us with gifts, me especially. At first, I was thrilled. What little girl does not want clothes from Paris, stuffed animals from Japan…” I trailed off, deciding against describing the worst part of it all.
James put one hand on my face. He kissed me tenderly.
“You don’t have to tell me anymore if you don’t want to. But I think this is good for you, sweetheart. Have you ever told anyone about it?”
“No. But everyone knew. There was a trial. It was a huge to-do, believe me. It was still getting press, even twelve years after it happened. The entire saga was used as a weapon against my mother. I might not have agreed with her politically, but suggesting that her absence in our home resulted in a disgusting pedophile being able to assault her daughter is an accusation that is untrue, at best. At worst, it is a completely disgraceful show of chauvinism, and you know how I just love that.” I rolled my eyes and scowled. “Plus, I did not appreciate being used as a weapon in the war of politics.”
“Who would appreciate that? But especially after something like that...” He shook his head, unsure of how to handle that particular topic. It was hard for people to imagine, I knew. Most people on Earth had been lucky in that they did not have to live from election to election as they grew up. They did not have to be slandered and used as a tool of manipulation in the great game of sympathy, anger, and fear, with the great victory of votes.
“Yes. It was quite unfortunate for everyone involved, not just me.”  
“If there was a trial, then you must have told someone about it after it happened.”
“I told my mother, surprisingly enough. She confronted Michael. She was livid. She had me seen by a doctor who confirmed that what I had said occurred actually had. If you had seen me during that appointment, after what had happened to me...” I shook my head slightly as the screams and cries that had erupted from me that day echoed in perfect clarity through my mind.
“Your mom was there with you, though, wasn't she?”
“Yes. I will say that I am thankful for her presence in that case, at least. She managed to calm me down enough for them to gather whatever information it was that they needed to gather.”
“So, they were able to prove it, then?”
“I said that already, James Maxwell.” I scolded him only somewhat seriously.
“You did.” He realized, and his hands tightened around mine. “I'm sorry, baby.”
“It is alright. Michael lied his way out of it. I will not tell you how cruel he was to me after he found out that I had told.” 
My voice was devoid of emotion as I retold the awful experience to him. It was the first time I had ever spoken outwardly about it with a third party. I could feel the heavy weight lifting from me as I spoke.
“What about Maura? What did she do?”
“She was always in the house when it happened. He started giving me a sedative to keep me quiet. Before I would succumb to the drug, though, I would scream for her. I would…” I stopped again, ashamed of what I was about to say.
“Go on. It’s okay.”
“I would beg her, James. I would plead with her to stop him. She would cry and cover her ears, screaming to me that she was so sorry.” I rolled my eyes and then paused for a long moment, trying to channel my anger. After looking away from him, I came back to my senses somewhat.
“I do not know why I am telling you this.”
“It doesn’t matter why. The point is that someone is hearing it.”
“I swore I would never speak of it again. I made my mother swear that we would pretend it never happened. She was apologetic for allowing Mike to convince her that I was just projecting his image onto the face of the true person who had done that to me. He also told her that I was a fanciful little girl who enjoyed making up dramatic stories like what I read in my books. His lies were outrageous, to say the least. I never would have believed them. I swore a lot of things to myself after that. I swore I would never allow a man near me again. I swore I would never be vulnerable like that again. What you and I are doing now goes against everything that I have ever believed.”
“And how do you feel about going against everything you’ve ever believed?”
I smiled slightly as I looked into his eyes again.
“Because it is you, I don’t mind. At least not anymore. If there is one thing I can say with absolute certainty and with no shame, it is that I trust you, James. You promised me a moment ago that you would never hurt me that way, and I believe you with no doubt in my mind. You do not have even a trace of that cruelty in your heart. I trust you.”
How he had managed to break through the defensive walls of everything I had ever sworn to myself, every protective measure that I had set into place, I will never fully understand. I give all the credit to fate; James and I were meant to be together for reasons that were unclear to us then.
“Good,” He kissed my hand, “I know that your trust is hard-earned. I appreciate that. I won’t ever make you sorry. I promise.”
I nodded.
“I have never told anybody this before. It is strange, to share it so openly. I do feel a great deal of shame, which is why what Elijah said was so incredibly hurtful. If I had feelings, they might have been hurt.”
“Oh, Lord…” James rolled his eyes, “That’s another Brynna-ism.”
I grinned.
“I can never outwardly admit being hurt. That’s why I never cry. It’s weakness. I don’t tolerate weakness in myself or in those that I helped raise. That’s why Violet gets the brunt of my insanity. You know, I look at Violet and Penny, and I cannot imagine turning them away if they came to me with that. If they told me that the worst had happened, I would believe them. I would not doubt for a second that they were being absolutely truthful. I would kill the man responsible as painfully as possible. I would feel no remorse for it. That is a horrible, immoral truth. It goes against everything we are taught when studying anything spiritual. But it is the only truth, James.”
“You don’t have to justify that to me. You don’t have to apologize for that. I understand because that’s how I feel about you. I’d kill anyone who threatened or hurt you. You don’t have to worry about being hurt like that again. It will never happen while I’m here. I know that you are more than capable of taking care of yourself. But I’ll always be right behind you, watching over you. I promised you that, didn’t I?”
I nodded, feeling tears well in my eyes. I reached up to swipe them away before they fell. We had covered a landmine-strewn emotional field together. I had discussed the horrid experience that defined my childhood with him when I had never been able to stomach the subject with anyone else. But I still would not cry in front of him. I would not cry in front of anyone. Quite simply, I would not cry at all, ever.
“Damn you, James Maxwell, you have made authentic tears come into my eyes.”
He smiled and kissed my hand again.
“But you don’t have to be upset about it because they didn’t fall, did they?”
“Nope. You will never see the day that happens. So don't hold your breath.”
“I won’t. I mean what I said, baby. You’re safe now. Your life comes before mine. I can’t…” He put both of his hands on my face, “I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how my feelings for you grew this quickly. I’m not used to this. On Earth, I was in and out of different relationships from week to week. But you…” He tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear, “You’re different. It hasn’t been long since I’ve known you, but I think I felt this way from the very beginning, Brynna.”
I smiled, feeling more real tears in my eyes. He reached up and wiped them away.
“I feel quite the same way about you. And I know it was from the moment I met you. Well, after I realized that you were not trying to assault and kill me.”
“That took a while.” He told me, and we both laughed again. “I knew that you would warm up to me eventually.”
“I have more than warmed up to you. I feel great fondness for you.”
“Yeah, you’re not so bad yourself.”
“Oh, good.” I said with a smile.
“Do you want to go to sleep, or do you want to go look around?”
“I know that you want to look around so I will accompany you. But let’s make it quick.”
The house was very easy to become lost in, even with James’s above-average sense of direction. We found our way into the kitchen, where there was a group of people cleaning up. Apparently, they had just had dinner while we were still downstairs in the cells. The kind people there offered us some food that they were wrapping to put away in the basement. We declined, but I did ask for them to send a generous helping of everything upstairs to Penny, Violet, and Elijah. I even asked on behalf of the other three. They agreed, and we continued our exploration.
On the third floor where we had come from, there were enough rooms that few people had to share. Of course, the house's population included families that wanted to room together, so there was even extra space for anyone that came along looking for shelter.
“We made the right choice.” A man told us when we stopped to talk with him about his experience living there. “There are three meals a day, a roof over our heads, and we’re safe from the natives and the other people from the ship. What else can we ask for?”
Still, I was reluctant to believe that all was well. I was never going to let down my guard, no matter how comfortingly normal my surroundings were. The joyful, relieved testaments of the other residents were not enough to break my cautionary view of our current situation.
James agreed that we needed to keep an eye out for danger.
“I don’t trust anything that’s too good to be true.” He told me, “I think these people are afraid, and they’re willing to believe what they want to believe. It’s stupid to do that, as you well know.”
“Yes, I do.” I replied as I inhaled the smoke from the last cigarette in my pack. We were sitting on the back porch, staring out at the rain that had begun to fall. The smell was heavenly and should have convinced me that it was alright to believe that we were safe. But any sign from God or the Gods that everything was going to be okay was still met with distrust in me. I had three other people for whom I was responsible. I could not allow my desire to feel secure to override my cynicism.
“They’re going to believe every word out of that guy’s mouth. He holds a lot of power, and I don’t like it.” James told me darkly. I looked over at him to find that his brown eyes were illuminated by the touches of sunlight that were still able to break through the rain clouds. When I did not reply, he looked over at me.
“What? Why are you smiling?”
“No reason.” I said, but my smile grew, “You are a handsome devil.”
He chuckled softly and leaned over to kiss me.
“That was a random assertion, but I appreciate it very much. You're the female equivalent of that.”
“Oh, why thank you.” I grinned, but then returned to the topic at hand. “Anyway, he is so timid, and yet, I don't trust him. I don’t trust anyone who holds power over a whole group of people. I am surprised that so many people trust him after their experiences with my father.”
“Well, your father was a prime example of why it's unwise to trust those with too much power. He appointed himself our leader at the campsite, and I was not going to live under the thumb of Daniel Olivier. I preferred taking my chances out in the woods. I would take on one hundred natives single-handed before I lived under his rules.”
“Well, I don’t think that Don possesses the ability to enact the same cruel laws and regulations that my father put into place. He was starving people, did you know that? He wanted nature to take its course so that our population there would dwindle. That man we just spoke to was one of them. His daughter almost died. I could sense the fear of losing her still hanging about in his mind. It was fading away, but it was still present.”
“Your father is exactly the type of person that we don’t need here. He is the proverbial wolf amongst the proverbial flock of sheep.”
“It does not help that most of the sheep are so desperate for a strong leader that they will follow anyone. That is why we need to exercise caution while we are here. Don could turn into the same beast that my father has always been. It is too much power for one person.”
“I agree, baby. You know I agree with that.” He looked at me, wanting to ask a question that he knew I would be reluctant to answer.
“Go on, darling.” I rolled my eyes to the overcast sky above our heads.
“What happened to you after I left the campsite?”
I flicked the ember off of my cigarette and exhaled the last precious puff of smoke. I watched it billow away, wanting to do nothing more than dodge that particular conversation. I knew how angry it would make him. It still infuriated me enough to drive that killer instinct I was just beginning to discover. The relationship between my father and I had always been a violent one devoid of any semblance of love and respect. But I never could have guessed, even with infinite knowledge, that he would hand me over to Adam as a peace offering. He had suggested that Adam was entranced with me, which I knew was true. If my father was aware of that, then he knew that trading me to Adam would have resulted in the worst possible assault, one that I had already experienced. The most despicable aspect of it was that my father did not care what Adam did to me. He only wanted to guarantee his own safety.
“Hey…” James was saying gently. When I resurfaced, I found that his hands were on my face. I looked up at him, realizing that I had briefly left the common time-frame in order to dwell within the space of those nasty, heart-tugging thoughts.
I opened my mouth to ask how long it had been since I had submerged into silence, but before I could, James answered me, knowing that the question was coming because he knew me so well already.
“Only a few minutes.” He told me, and after a gentle kiss, he studied me closely to discern whether or not I was alright.
“I am sorry.” I told him dryly. I did not know what else to say.
“Don’t apologize. You never apologize for anything. Definitely don’t apologize for that, sweetheart.”
“What occurred between my father and me is not difficult for me to discuss. The topic we were speaking of earlier is much harder. I do not understand either event, though. I do not understand how a man can want to cause harm to his own child. Not just any harm, either, but the worst. He told me that Adam wanted me. In exchange, Adam was offering him safety. I would like to give my father the benefit of the doubt and say that he just wanted to protect those for whom he was responsible, meaning the whole campsite.”
“But that’s bullshit, and you know it!” James hissed furiously. I could see him shaking in rage.
“Please don’t get angry. It is just not worth it, James.”
“You’re worth me getting angry over, Brynna! What else did he say?”
“There were many things that he said. He did not admit it out loud, but he is terrified by the idea of people evolving while he stays the same. He was going to round them all up and either banish them or kill them outright. It is truly disgusting, how horrible of a person he is. It is mind-boggling, to say the very least. The reason why he even took me away from the others is because he was afraid and repulsed by what I was turning into. When the natives attacked, I changed over so I could fight them off. I think the entire campsite saw. The other people were afraid, too.”
“How did you get away?”
“Elijah, Alice, and Quinn broke into the ship to get me. They are all changing over, as you very well know. They embrace what they are turning into the same way that you and I do. Through their strength and their ability to fight, they were able to get me out.”
James nodded before asking another uncomfortable question.
“Why did he hit you?”
That bitterness I had so long embraced in order to survive the depressing truth burgeoned inside of me sickeningly, like a rose turned black with rot; it forced a small smile of disgusted disbelief to appear on my face.
“I did exactly what you just witnessed. I went out of it. It reminded him of something that he will never forgive. He knew that I was in that exact state of mind while my brother was dying. I am aware that you know all about that, just like you know all about Michael, my mother, my siblings...”
For my sake, he lightened the mood with a joke.
“Yeah. That’s all public record, not that I was spying on you or anything. Not that I was looking you up, drooling over your picture, climbing up your broken fire-escape to gaze in at you longingly... Nothing like that. Of course not.”
As always, his dry sense of humor got the better of me. Despite all that we had just discussed, I laughed, almost hysterically. I embraced him, so appreciative of his easy maneuvering out of tight emotional spaces in which I was uncomfortable. He was beyond angry at my father for what he had done. I understood that our evolution sharpened our emotions, creating a storm of potency that was felt through every limb. Somehow, James was able to suppress his animal rage for me. After tightening my arms around him, I kissed his neck.
“I didn’t follow you to that bar. It was strictly coincidence, you know.” He added, and I giggled again, shocked that he was able to bring forth such a girlish sound in me. I had never giggled a day in my life until I met him. In fact, I even hated the word ‘giggle.’
“No, you admitted that you were stalking me. You are a legitimate creeper.”
“Only for you, my love. My love, my love, my love…”
I laughed again, and then we were kissing fervently, completely unaware of the world around us.
“Sorry to interrupt…”
Don blasted Abba.
“Really?” I muttered irritably. I pulled away from James, whom I could see was equally aggravated by the interruption.
“I know it has only been a few hours, but how are you settling in?”
I looked at James, blinking in disbelief. What a trivial question so unworthy of our time. I had to remind myself that he was just being courteous.
“It is nice.” I answered vaguely.
“Just nice?”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked, “Are you expecting thanks? Did I thank you yet?”
“No. But I’m not after gratitude. It’s unimportant to me.”
“Well, it should be very important to you.” I told him, “We are incredibly thankful that you are allowing us to stay here. The house is amazing. What you are doing here is remarkable, really.”
“I try my best.” Don replied humbly, “I know that my interruption is not welcome. But besides inquiring how you two are adjusting thus far, I also wanted to offer you work.”
James and I both were well aware that work was certainly not being offered; it was being quietly demanded. I wondered briefly what the consequences would be if we declined. I was not so narcissistic as to believe that we should be excused from responsibilities. I was simply curious. I was still on my quest to discover the complete blueprint of Don Abba's emotional and intellectual flow. In short, I was attempting to peg his personality accurately in order to determine whether or not we had anything to fear from him.
Alright, that was not a short explanation...
“Do we have choices?” I asked Don.
“Of course.” He smiled and leaned against one of the porch’s posts, “Well, you do, Brynna. But James, you’ll like what I’m offering you. I know that this job is right up your alley.”
“How nice.” James replied irritably.
“Stop it.” I scolded him.
“You’re too intimidating to be put on yard work, or in the garden, or in the kitchen. You definitely belong with our security detail. Being a guard is perhaps the most important job here, given the circumstances. We’ve been doing the best we can with who we have, but you’re perfect for the job.”
“You really think so?” James asked emotionlessly.
I glared at James, prompting him to hold his hands up in surrender.
“I’m done.”
“Forgive him. He has forgotten his manners. He is also very grateful to be staying here. He has said so himself. Why he is not making his gratitude known is beyond me, but I intend to find out.”
“It’s alright. You all have had a rough time out there. I know. It took us two days to get here. We had to fight our way through natives and creatures, too. I know how hard it is. It changes a person, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. James glared at him.
“Now, don’t get me wrong, we have many men and women working in security who are very good at what they do. The men have evolved into exactly what you’re evolving into.”
“And what is that, Don?” James asked.
“I don’t know exactly what to call it. The term around here is ‘Strong-Arm.’ Adam says the official name for them is the Herculians. They were regular people, just like you were. Once they got here, they bulked up. They took hold of their animal nature proudly, just like you. You all have been gifted with unthinkable strength.”
James stared at him, so irritated by his presence that I had to bite my lip in order to suppress a laugh. His glare turned to me; he was even more aggravated by how amusing I found his bad attitude.
“Well, I’ll do the job because I know I don’t have a choice.” He ignored me as I buried my face in his neck so I could laugh quietly. He didn't shake me off, despite how angry he was; in fact, his arm tightened around my shoulders.
“Alright. Fantastic.” Don smiled genuinely again, “And you, Brynna,” I looked up at him, “I thought about putting you on the same job.”
“I would do I,t but I assume that one who works security has to spend a lot of time out of the house. Am I correct in that assumption?”
“Indeed.”
“Well, I have my sisters to look after. If it is possible, I would prefer something where I can be close to them. I do not assume that anyone will try to hurt them…”
“You don’t need to explain.” Don held up his hand in an attempt to pacify my belief that I was somehow offending him. “I understand completely.”
“Okay, then.” I frowned in uncertainty at his show of empathy. “I can do just about anything. So, you name it, I will do it,” I paused, realizing that I had given him far too much freedom to choose my occupation, “Just not bathrooms. I do not do bathrooms.”
Don laughed.
“How about helping out in the kitchen? Do you do that?”
I laughed, too, in utter relief.
“Sure. Why not? I am not the best cook in the world, but I will help out as best I can.”
“Great. How would your sisters like that job?”
“They would positively adore it, I am sure. They have always liked toiling about in the kitchen. They used to bake something every weekend together at my apartment. I am not saying that all of their attempts were successful…”
“That doesn’t matter. There will be plenty of help for all of you. I am just a firm believer in the fact that people need to work. If we are going to all live here together, everyone should be doing something to help out. What we grow in the garden or cook in the kitchen can certainly be kept individually, but some has to go to everyone. I need your honest opinion. Do you feel that I’m right in that?”
I was not going to lie, certainly not for his sake.
“Yes, I agree wholeheartedly.”
“Good. I know that you’re very bright. People who can think like you should definitely lend their opinion because it always seems to be useful.”
Oh, flattery. The man was trying to win my approval as though the entire existence of his little colony depended on it.
“What if I had said no?” I asked in a challenge that was perhaps unfair.
He was taken aback for a moment, but he quickly shrugged off my question with his soft, easy-going smile.
“Well, I would have had to rethink a few things.”
Now, I was not foolish enough to believe that if I had disagreed with him, he would have changed his entire operation based on my opinion. When he said he would have had “to rethink a few things”, he meant only that he would be shortening the duration of our stay in his home. Don believed that from his response, I would be tickled that he valued my opinion but instead, I saw only the clear message he was trying to convey: He was in control.
Because of his smile and his stature, one would not have been able to decipher that aggressive meaning behind his humdrum words easily, if one even could at all. But his ruse was not fooling James and me in the slightest.
“James, a group is heading out for the campsite tomorrow. Would you like to accompany them?”
There was another question to which there was one set answer.
“What are they after?”
“Just as much as they can carry from the underbelly of the ship. As many supplies as possible. We try to go every couple of days.”
“It takes two days to get there, you said?” I asked, and my eyes widened slightly. I did not want him to go if he would be gone for so long. I was far too used to his constant presence. We did not spend every waking moment latched together, but I was comforted by knowing that he was near at all times. I could not imagine adjusting to our first days in Don’s camp without him.
“No, that was just with stopping to rest, rerouting, you know. If he leaves by sunup, he’ll be back by sundown.”
“Oh.” I sat back again and pulled James’s arm onto my shoulder where it had been before I had moved.
“That’s fine with me.” James told Don.
“Great. Adam has provided us with some knives and spears to use. However,” Don leaned forward conspiratorially, “I will tell you that I am after the guns that were brought.”
“My father’s guards have the guns. If he has joined with the Bachums, who knows where they are?” I informed him dismally.
“The Bachums and their people are in the north. We don’t know exactly where. But if any of those guns were left behind, especially since your father’s guards have a few of them, we need to have the rest. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“That certainly wasn’t hard to understand, so yes.” James replied sourly.
I rolled my eyes and swore to myself that I would beat him later for being so incredibly rude.
“You shouldn’t run into any trouble since they’re so far north. But if you do…”
“I can handle it. I’m sure your other security dogs can, too.”
“I have full faith in you. Anyway, we don’t have any rules around here, so wander about for as long as you want.”
“Well, I am so glad to hear that I don’t have a curfew, Don. Thanks.”
I scowled back at him almost evilly.
“Generally, I am the one accused of possessing a snarky streak, but my lovely boyfriend seems to be trying to give me a run for my money. You have my apologies for that.”
“It’s quite alright. Like I said, we spent two days out there. I can’t imagine spending a week. Have a good evening, you two.”
He was gone as quickly as he had come.
“Well, you seem to really like him.” James's irritation was evident when he stood up and started to pace. “Were you just agreeing with me earlier to agree with me when you said you didn’t trust him?”
“I don’t trust him, James. But that does not mean I am going to be openly hostile towards him when he has kindly let us into this home…”
“Everyone needs to work…” James muttered, “Like we really have a choice!”
“We do not have a choice, not if we want to stay here. It is not unfair of him to ask for everyone to contribute. I will give him that.”
“You’ll give him a lot of credit when he doesn’t deserve it. You’re falling for that little act of his. You are just like the other people here! You’re so desperate to believe that we’re safe…”
“Do not even accuse me of pulling the wool over my eyes! I am constantly on the alert for anything even remotely shady, be it here, or in the woods, or…”
“You were the one who said there was no reason for them to kick my ass like they did.”
“Is that what this is about?” I asked him incredulously, “James, I told you that in a fair fight, you would have killed them. Nobody sees you as being any less for what happened…”
“I am well aware that I would have killed them in a fair fight. I certainly don’t need your reassurance on that.”
“Then I will stop reassuring you! It is all very simple, James; if we want to stay here, we need to tow the line, listen to what he says, within reason…”
“See, that!” He snapped and pointed his finger at me, “‘Within reason.' That is where the problem is going to come in. We don’t know exactly what is 'within reason' for him. I know that there is more to him than that little charade that he puts on! What was the purpose of drugging us?!”
“I suppose he needed to know where our allegiance was, or…”
“No! It was a power-play, Brynna! Goddamn it, you are not stupid! Stop acting like you are! You need to see all of this for what it is! He was showing us exactly how much control he has over the situation. He was showing us that he’s willing to resort to assaulting people in order to find out what he wants to know!”
“He is not even that smart!” I snapped at him. Every last one of those notions presented in his tirade were completely hyperbolic, to say the least. I almost laughed at how ludicrous they were.
“Goddamn it, don't even grin like that, like I'm being an idiot and you're up on a cloud of knowledge looking down on me!”
“Relatively good simile, if I may...”
He punched one of the smaller pillars on the porch, sending pieces of wood and tiny projectiles of white paint flying. I frowned; we had been conscious in Don's house for less than three hours and already, we had dented a wall (when I had slapped Elijah) and broken a part of his lovely, picturesque porch.
“Do not start that right now.” James growled furiously, “Do not underestimate this situation and try to distract me from telling you exactly how deep in shit we are!”
“Oh, God or Gods, you are so dramatic!” I exclaimed as I covered my face in irritation. “This is not a matter of me ignoring the level of danger. This is a matter of you and me disagreeing on how high that level is.”
“He’s aligned with Adam, so it's pretty fucking high, Brynna!”
Once again, I was scowling. Oh, I how I loathed profanity...
“You and I both know that Adam would like to see all of us dead! He doesn't just want the Bachums gone! He wants all of us gone!”
“Well, he'll never get all of us gone.” I mimicked him, which only added to his fury. “James, I don’t find his alliance with Adam to be admirable or even wise. I certainly don’t trust Adam, but…”
“There is something very bad brewing here, Brynna.”
His voice was lower and more civil. If he could not convince me with his brash fury, then he would try to beseech my understanding with calmness. But I could see that he was still livid at my “naivety.” His body was shaking, sending sprays of blood from his busted knuckles flying wildly. His brown eyes were still swirled with flecks of red. Seeing the physical evidence of his out-of-proportion and horribly misguided anger only irritated me.
“I know you feel it as well as I do.” He continued, “It’s not only here in this house, it’s the whole damn planet. We fell right into the middle of a war between the city-people and the cave-people. Now, Adam is using us as pawns in the game. You’re going to have to forgive me for not wanting to fight a war that I care nothing about! Earlier, you said that you hated being a pawn in the political game. This is just like that.”
“James...” I said in a furious whisper, “Do not take what I said earlier and use it to your advantage. Do not try to use something that I confided in you as manipulation.”
“If that's what it will take to make you see this, then I will use it, Brynna!”
“Then you run the risk of infuriating me. If you want to take that risk, then go ahead!” I stopped, took a deep breath and tried to regain some of my composure. “James, I know that these are not the most desirable circumstances…”
“Yeah, no shit, baby...”
“Will you stop interrupting me for half a second so I can say what I want to say?!” I snapped at him. Now my irritation had made the high jump back to anger.
“Fine, go on. I'm sure this will be riveting.”
“Oh my God, just shut up!” I exclaimed, but after a deep breath, I resumed talking at a mild volume. “Adam has said that it will be either Don’s group or the Bachums’ group that will be able to live here free of any threat. We have no choice but to fight if we want to live here. It does not matter if we believe in what he believes. We need to live here safely, do you understand?”
“Of course I understand! This just isn’t the way to go about it! I really thought you were smarter than this, Brynna.”
I stood up, completely livid now.
“Do not suggest for even a moment that your intelligence rises above or is even on par with mine! I can feel things before they happen! I can read into people’s hearts and minds! Not to mention, on Earth, I probably could have dismantled an atomic bomb while playing a game of chess, and…”
“You are so arrogant! It drives me insane, Brynna!”
“Really? Well, you are ungrateful and proud!”
“As if you’re not proud! I don’t know why I’m taking any lectures from you about being polite, the way you tear your own sister and brother down all the time!”
“That is none of your business! And just for the record, I do that…”
“To feel superior, because you’re arrogant! It’s easier for you to be a bitch to them than to actually be their sister. And just so you know, let me clarify this for you: Refusing to feel anything is more of a sign of weakness than feeling whatever it is that you feel. Not to mention that while you’re projecting all of your anger onto them, you’re destroying them! You have a complex and half, I’m telling you!”
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Maxwell!” I exclaimed as I clapped my hands, “I do not know what would have happened to me if I had not received your astute psychological analysis! Please, say whatever you need to say! Say what you are feeling because I will not! All of this is in response to Don and Adam?!”
“It’s in response to you walking around like you know everything, and then you going and exhibiting such astounding stupidity! That’s what this is about, Brynna! I want you to get your head on straight!”
“No, you want me to acknowledge some vast character flaws you feel I possess.” I was not yelling anymore. I could see our fight for what it really was, and the reality made me rather sad. “You want to knock me down a few pegs, as they say.”
“I want you to see things for what they are.” He reiterated firmly. “But I also want you to see just how ridiculous you calling me out for being rude is. Yes, I want you to realize that being a cold, hypocritical bitch is going to destroy those girls the same way your mother and Maura being cold, hypocritical bitches destroyed you.”
“Wow, apparently it is the day for the men in my life to hurl overly personal insults at me. I am going to bed so that hopefully tomorrow, it will be the day when those men either apologize or fall off of a cliff!”
“Yes, because that was so mature, Brynna.”
“Perhaps it was not, but I will not be debating that with you. Please, for your own sake, find somewhere else to sleep tonight.”
I turned away, stung by all that had been shouted or venomously spat. What Elijah had said earlier received a new breath of life in my mind; it bounced back to the forefront to intermingle gladly with James’s cruel words. I was amazed that our fight had descended into such hostility. I understood that he was angry with me for not seeing things his way. I understood that he was frustrated because in his opinion, I was allowing myself to embrace naivety in place of a true grasp on the dangerous situation in which we had fallen when we had come seeking Don’s help.
After returning to our bedroom and closing the door, I laid down on the bed. It was more like a gigantic pillow than a mattress, I decided. Thousands of feathers filled the two pieces of fabric that had been sewn together all around the ends. Under my head were regular pillows, fashioned the same way. The animal fur blanket was soft on both sides, keeping me warm despite the chill in my heart.
Maura was in my mind, shaking her head at me. I warned you, she seemed to be saying. You allowed yourself to fall victim to his charms.
She was right, but I still snapped at her to go away using disgusting obscenities that I had never uttered, even mentally.
The door opened and closed quietly about an hour later. I heard his footsteps approach the bed. I had my eyes closed and was pretending to be asleep, but I listened as he unlaced his shoes and let them fall with a hard thud to the floor. As I wondered if he was going to attempt to wake me in order to apologize, he shed his shirt and pants and crawled into bed beside me. I waited, feeling his eyes on me. I did not know if I would accept his apology even if he offered one. We had been fighting and cruel things were always said in the heat of a fight. They were things that were not meant. They were simply intended to weaken the defenses of the other person, for reasons that neither party truly understood. We only hurt the ones we love, after all. That expression is an apt way to determine the causality of fights between people, but it certainly does not determine a sure reason why we feel the need to tear down the ones for whom we care.
I felt a fresh surge of anger roar to life in his heart as he turned away from me.
I fell asleep.
***

I could not be sure that what occurred the following morning was just a dream. I assumed that it must have been the ideas of the hidden-away little girl who did exist somewhere inside of me. She was projecting her idealistic view of how a fight should resolve into my dreams.
I felt James’s lips moving slowly up my arm to my neck and then to my cheek.
“I’m sorry.” He whispered in my ear.
And then, profoundly shocking both the cynical shrew and that wide-eyed, empty-headed little girl inside of me, he whispered:
“I love you.”
It was a dream. I awoke with the familiar longing to fall back into the sea of sleep where those poignant moments occurred. If there was one feeling that I loathed profoundly, it was awaking from the soothing alternate universe that existed only in sleep to find a harsh, hostile reality gnashing its teeth at me. I had been experiencing that literal wake-up call for much of my life. It never lost its potent, pitiless edge.
“You look tired.” Alice informed me gently when I exited my room for my first day of work. She was attempting to make nice with me by displaying concern for my well-being. I was in no mood to hold a grudge. I nodded in response.
“Are you alright?”
“I am peachy, dear.” I lied effortlessly, “All is right with the world now that we are here.”
“It is amazing, isn’t it?” She beamed brightly and began to pull her long, blonde hair into a messy bun on top of her head. “I really feel like we’re going to be okay from here on out. It will be easy to forget that there’s a fight going on.”
“Indeed.” My insides soured upon hearing such blind optimism spoken out loud so freely. Was I spewing that same nonsense the night before? Was that what had angered James? Alice’s belief that all was perfectly well could be forgiven, for she had never displayed my same intelligent distrust. I had pulled the wool over my eyes, however briefly. James’s final words would not be excused until he had apologized properly. But I admitted bitterly that he was right in all the other things he had said.
“Where’s James?”
“He joined security detail. They need some muscle, I suppose.”
“Quinn got that job, too!” Alice was clearly enthused by the common link between us. Both of our men were out fighting for our continued survival. We were bonded together by the sisterhood of brave women left behind by braver men. I suppressed a gag and several very self-righteous thoughts.
“Did he offer you that job?” I asked her, and my mind cleared of all intelligence when she spoke again.
“No. He said that you, Penny, and Violet would be working in the kitchen, and that I would be put there. Why? Did he offer that job to you?”
“He did. I should have taken it. I do not know how I am going to fare doing something that requires no adrenaline or fangs.”
“I know, right?” Alice said, and I rolled my eyes, “After what we’ve been through these past couple of days, it’s going to be weird not to be constantly looking over our shoulders, isn’t it?”
“Indeed. Alice,” I looked at her, prepared to shock myself by asking such a candid question of an intellectual inferior, “You and Quinn were experiencing some difficulties in your relationship before. Though his reasoning behind his anger was flawed and he knew that, he did not let it go.”
“Yeah, he’s really stubborn. He always has been. He always thinks he’s right, even when he’s being ridiculous, like he was with that fight we had. It drives me crazy sometimes.”
“So, how did it resolve? How did you settle the matter?”
Alice gaped at me for a moment, stunned that I was actually posing a question to her. In asking for a solution to mine and James’s problem, I was admitting that she knew something I did not. I expected her to stick her tongue out at me, gloat for the duration of our walk down to the kitchen, and then tell everyone she met about my moment of cerebral weakness.
Instead, she reached out, placed her hand on my arm, and rubbed it comfortingly. I cringed for a moment but then realized that her consolation was needed, however slightly.
“You’re so weird.” She told me with a small smile. “Every time someone touches you, you cringe.”
“Yes. I have been told by several practitioners of the voodoo science that is psychoanalysis that I have trust issues. Could you answer my question?”
“Well, we just had to let it run its course, I guess. I had to wait for him to actually let me talk before I could apologize for whatever part I played in it.”
“So, you had to admit fault even though it was not…”
“No, I didn’t say that I admitted fault. I apologized for not talking about it sooner. I apologized for the misunderstanding. The rest of the apologies had to come from him because he was in the wrong. I know that you’re probably going to say that you’re not at fault, but between you and James, in complete honesty, who is wronger?”
“The correct term is 'more wrong' but...” I muttered, and she frowned jokingly at me, “Never mind. I am not going to be biased, as I have slept on it for a night and am seeing it clearly now. I should have said things differently. I should have acknowledged that perhaps I was being slightly hypocritical. I should have agreed with him because I do actually agree. But what he said to me would have been very hurtful if I had feelings that could be hurt…”
I saw her roll her eyes and smile slightly. I chose to ignore that. She chose not to call me on the ridiculous suggestion that I had no feelings.
“We were both angry. I think, in a way, we are testing one another. We are trying to see how deeply our devotion runs. I could be wrong, I suppose.”
“I don’t think so. But just know, from an outsider's perspective, that he really cares about you. I didn't think so before, but after watching you two these past couple of days, I can see that. I know that you two haven’t been together for very long…” She trailed off, and I realized that she had posed a question to me.
“Well, it has only been since I found him in the woods that we have been dating officially. But there was always a spark, a flirtation, if you will, from the moment I began to trust him. I cannot say I felt that way from the moment we met, because that is a long story.”
“Well, I’d love to hear it sometime. But just keep that in mind. It hasn’t been long, but his feelings for you run deep. It sounds really cheesy, but I can see it in the way he looks at you. And just so you know,” Alice beamed, “You look at him the same way.”
When she walked into the kitchen ahead of me, I smiled to myself. I knew she was right about that. For the first time, I acknowledged that my feelings for James had progressed far more quickly than I ever could have imagined. Those were not the hopeful, blindly sanguine feelings present at the early stages in relationships. It was not ‘puppy love’, as it was called. It was, quite simply, love.
It was a new breed of love, though. It was a perfect mixture of joyful lightness and dark recklessness. It was a love that could burn brilliantly or scorch painfully. It was far more enhanced than anything we could have experienced on Earth.
It was yet another complexity of Pangaean evolution.
***

I was not familiar with activities that were enjoyable due to the presence of other people, but that was the case with work in the kitchen. We had a daunting task ahead of us; we were required to utilize the homegrown Pangaean fruits, vegetables and the hunted meat to make a meal large enough to feed the entire population of Don’s commune. Violet, Alice and I shuddered at the task, only to be reassured that it was not only possible, it was much easier than it sounded, given how many hands were contributing.
I engaged in conversation with the other people, interested by each of their stories that were being shared with us freely. There were many different cultures coming together in that kitchen. There was a man from Brazil, a woman from Switzerland, a man from New Zealand… The list was endless. I enjoyed their company, truly.
“My husband is on guard duty, too.” A woman named Rachel told me.
“Do you worry about him? I am very worried about James and Elijah, admittedly.”
“I was at first. But look at what’s happening to all of us. We’re getting stronger every day. We’re becoming more like Adam’s people. Maybe if we were still completely human, I’d have to worry about him. But now, I don’t worry at all. They can handle themselves. We could handle ourselves out there, what with what we’re changing into!”
I laughed before replying.
“We could probably handle it better.”
She laughed raucously and nudged me with her elbow.
“That’s right, girl.” She looked up at Penny, “Your sister is beautiful.”
After watching the man from Japan expertly flip and toss his knives around before chopping the vegetables at record speed, Penny gasped, beamed brightly and clapped her hands in excitement. I covered my mouth as I beamed at the sight of her youthful enthusiasm.
“She is, isn't she?” I responded to Rachel after that moment of observing Penny.
“Is she secretly your little girl?” Rachel asked, and I shook my head before reconsidering.
“Well,” I replied softly, “yes, I suppose if she was not already before, she certainly is now.”
“You look at her the way moms look at their babies, I know that much. It’s very sweet.”
“Thank you.” I replied with a soft chuckle.
I returned to stirring the huge pot in front of me. It had taken six of us to lift it into its holder over the fire pit that was built at the far end of the kitchen, closest to the windows.
“Can I ask you something?” She asked after looking over at me.
I nodded and watched as she dropped some freshly cut spices into the boiling water.
“I suppose so.”
“How do you feel about the fact that she’ll never age?”
I had not thought about it. Given that I was prone to looking at the darker side of any scenario, I was surprised to find that Penny remaining five for all eternity was not something that scared or saddened me in any way.
“Don’t we all wish once we are older that we can go back to seeing things the way we did when we were children? When we are young, we see the magic in everything because we have not seen the darkness of the world yet. Penny will live in that state of mind forever. Yes, she will be my responsibility forever but...” I smiled, “that’s how it would have turned out anyway.”
Rachel smiled, too.
We were going to live forever on Pangaea. Eternity was far too great for us to imagine. We would witness every shift, gradual and sudden, that our new world underwent. We would never grow old, lose our strength and fade away. It was the dream of all living creatures, even those who did not admit it to themselves. Everyone wanted to remain in the common, known realm, sometimes for no other reason than that they were too afraid to face the unknown that came after. I could not help but smile at the thought of spending thousands upon thousands of years with James and my family, free from the worry of illness or the plague of old age. Sure, we could still die, if we were killed by another or by accident. But those were forces far easier to control than the deadly weapons wielded by nature.
And Penny would remain young and innocent forever. It was poetic, in a way; I had lost my own innocence at such a young age and yet Penny would retain hers for as long as she lived. Her childlike wonder would never escape her. It would never be replaced by the same harsh reality that woke me every morning. I was not envious of my little sister. I wanted nothing more than for her to have what I had lost. It was an added bonus that she now had it indefinitely.
Rachel was right; I looked at her the way a mother looked at her child. I wanted the best for her. I would trade my life with no questions, regrets or hesitations if it meant that hers would be lengthened.
When Maura had fallen short, I had done my best to take care of Penny. I had been so young and yet I knew that her precious life depended on my competency and care. I swore I would never fail her. I would never abandon her. I would never allow her to wonder if she was truly wanted. Now, she was officially my child. Our father and Maura were gone. Our mother was gone. Penny's happiness and her longevity depended on me. It had always been scary to be responsible for another life. It still was, but I knew that I could handle it.
Above all things, I knew that I could take care of Penny.
I walked over to her after my work was done and kissed her forehead.
“Are you having fun?” I tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear.
“Yeah. Did you see him juggle his knives?! And then he cut the vegetables really, really fast! I want to do that!”
“No!” I exclaimed as I wrapped her up in my arms, “That is far too dangerous, little one!”
“Will James play soccer with me again today?” Her arms were around me and her chin was pressed to my chest as she looked up at me.
“I’m sure he will.” I replied, and I was sure. Whatever problems James and I were experiencing would not deter him from playing the role of Penny's surrogate father. He adored my precious sister almost as much as I did. My smile grew at the thought of their bond. I pulled away from her and kissed her forehead again.
 “I love you, Penny.”
She beamed up at me, her blue eyes that matched my own alight with the glow from the mid-afternoon sun.
“I love you too, Brynna.”
***

James returned just as the sun was beginning to set. I had been in the throes of nicotine withdrawal for several hours before a fellow smoker took pity on me and offered one of his own cigarettes. I was just finishing it when I saw the group returning. They were talking loudly and hauling several bags. After willingly changing my eyes over to enhance my vision, I stood up from the porch-swing I had been sitting on. I needed to make sure he was with them. They were carrying on enthusiastically, clearly bonding over their joint mission and raving enthusiastically about their huge load and safe return. I saw James carrying on with Quinn and some other guys. I turned and walked over to the swing again after flicking out my cigarette.
“Hi, Brynna.” The men and women greeted me as they passed. Quinn outstretched his fist to me; I pounded my own against it and actually chuckled softly.
“Yeah, I’ll be in in a minute.” James called after them when they said that they were getting dinner. He sauntered over to me, grasping a pack of cigarettes in his hand. After sitting down beside me, he opened the pack and extracted two. I took one when he offered it to me and smiled slightly when he struck a match and lit the end of mine before lighting his own.
“So, I can see that you are enjoying camaraderie amongst your band of brothers.”
“And sisters. There are ladies in our group. This is an equal opportunist establishment, my dear.”
“I know it is. There are guys working in the kitchen and cleaning, too. I do so enjoy when traditional gender roles are trounced in favor of new-age equality.”
James laughed as he slid his arm around my shoulder and pulled me closer to him. I nestled my head against his chest.
“I’m sorry,” He told me softly, “I shouldn’t have said the things I said.”
I looked up at him.
“I am sorry, too. You are right about Don and this place. I suppose that while I am looking down upon those willing to unwisely take this arrangement at face value, I am doing just that. It is hypocritical, like you said.”
“But my reaction was over the top. And calling you cold-hearted…”
“And a female dog…”
He looked down at me and I grinned up at him. He exhaled smoke as he laughed.
“That, too... It was wrong of me, and I’m sorry.”
“We were both very upset. You have never given me reason to believe that you speaking to me that way is going to become commonplace. I am just so glad you’re back,” I rested my head on his chest again and held him tighter, “I was worried about you today.”
“Were you?” He asked, sounding bemused.
“Very much so. You know how I need to keep my eye on the people close to me constantly. When you all aren’t in my sight, the darkly creative side of me churns out countless horrendous scenarios. That tendency was hard enough to cope with on Earth. Now, we face threats every day. They are threats that we are unfamiliar with, also, which heightens my level of anxiety substantially. We are constantly in danger of being killed.”
“I know we are.”
“So, tell me news of the outside world, Vespucci.”
“Vespucci? That's an interesting choice.”
“Well, he did discover America. Would you prefer that I call you 'Columbus?’ I am sure you are aware of the rumor that has long circulated about him.”
“I am aware. Vespucci is fine.”
I giggled softly and closed my eyes, being soothed so wonderfully by the way he was rubbing my back.
“Alright, then. Spill the details of your brave excursion.”
“Well, the campsite is a ghost town, obviously. The bodies are still there. We all feel awful about that. They’re going to ask Don if we can go back and bury them.”
“And you are not angry that they are requesting Don’s permission to do something that should have been done immediately? Actually, that they are requesting his permission at all?”
“No. I’m not mad. I’m done being mad. I know that we can’t trust him, at least not completely. But I’ll give the guy a chance. That’s what you were suggesting last night, I know. I agree with you. We need to give this a chance.”
“Indeed, we do. What else happened?”
“The place has been turned over by the Bachums’ people, I assume. Tents were destroyed. The ship was broken into.”
“Well, they must not have stolen all the supplies. You all were hauling plenty of bags.”
“They didn’t take everything. There’s so much stuff down in those storage rooms, baby. It will take weeks to bring it all back. We’re going out again tomorrow but we're bringing the wheelbarrows with us. We’ll be able to transport even more than we did today.”
“What about the guns? Did they get those, too?”
“They cleaned out most of them, yeah. But we managed to find five.”
“Just five?” I looked up at him in slight alarm, “You mean to tell me that those radically religious dimwits have the rest of the guns?”
“That is what I mean to tell you. It’s unfortunate…”
“It is more than unfortunate. They could storm in here any day and we would not stand a chance!”
“They’re not going to do that, though.”
“Really? That is exactly what I would instruct my empty-headed minions to do, if I were directing their little Guerilla Bible Club.”
“The fact that they’re a Bible Club might work in our favor, if you…” James started but upon seeing the look that I gave him, he backtracked. “Right.”
“You know exactly what I am going to say, so I am not going to say it aloud, lest I wish to become very irritated. Of course, it goes both ways, doesn’t it? Don’s group seems to be all the people who don’t care about religion or government or anything at all, really. That can be just as dangerous as the other extreme.”
“It can,” James agreed, “But let’s not worry until we have to worry, okay?” I looked at him for a long moment. “Okay? Okay?” I smiled, laid my head against his chest and closed my eyes when he began to soothingly rub my back again. My arms tightened around his middle. “Let’s just enjoy this charade of safety and security for as long as humanly possible.”
“When you put it like that, you make it very difficult for me to pretend.”
“I apologize for that from the bottom of my heart, my dear.”
“You do not, you terrible scourge of a man.”
“I do so, you abominable wench.” It was not even a second after the words had left his mouth that we were doubled over, laughing loudly and hysterically. “That was so bad. I'm sorry, baby...” He managed to say as he continued to laugh.
“Oh, my God...” I was wiping the tears of pure, joyful hysteria from my eyes. “That was so boldly simplistic and impassively spoken...”
“What?!”
“Guys!” Violet came running onto the porch. We both jumped up, all signs of our merriment from just a moment before erased. Given her abrupt arrival, we thought that there was some terrible emergency unfolding inside.
“What's happening?” I demanded quickly.
“Nothing,” Violet chuckled to herself, “Everything is cool. Dinner’s ready. What are you two carrying on about out here?”
“Oh, nothing, darling,” I replied as I wiped at my eyes again, “James is very humorous.” I held James’s hand as he flicked his cigarette out with the other. Once the ember was off, he put the cigarette on the end of his thumb and prepared to flick it onto the lawn. “Don’t you dare litter!”
“Whoa! Pump your brakes, crazy!” He exclaimed as he and Violet both laughed, “A raging environmentalist, my girlfriend is.”
“Your inverted syntax, I love, Mr. Maxwell.”
“You love Mr. Maxwell?” He asked, and I reached back to slap him lightly in the chest several times.
“You are hell-bent on driving me insane!” I exclaimed but I couldn’t fight the smile that had spread across my lips. He always brought out that breezy, easy-going side of me. It was refreshing after so many years of smiling only when absolutely necessary and laughing never.
He was walking behind me with his arms wrapped around my neck. He kissed my cheek as we hobbled along towards the dining room.
“You’ve been driving me insane since the day we met. This is just revenge.”
“Yeah?” I asked, “I hate you.”
We had reached the dining room. He kissed my cheek one last time, prompting an ugly glare to come our way from Elijah. We were standing in the doorway, observing the dinner scene. Everyone was crowded around at least fifty tables that had been arranged in a long, curved line. The massive dining room was full to the brim with the people of the house. The laughter and loud discussions of those great many individuals filled our ears as we noted the warm light cast by the torches that lined the wall and the orange glow of the sunset streaming through the many windows. The sight would have made an interesting, very aesthetically-pleasing painting. I could not help but feel the faint glow of hope inside of me that everything would stay picturesque, just like that. I was amazed by how soothing the sight of those people and that place was.
“You hate me?”
“Yes, I do.” I replied, but I was still observing the room.
“That’s very sad.” He told me dryly before whispering in my ear, “Because I love you.”
I actually gasped out loud. He took my hand and led me into the dining room before I could respond. When we sat down beside Penny and Violet, he did not look at me. I was incredulous at his confession. I thought that it would be ages before he felt the same level of affection for me that I felt for him. My heart soared and I bit my lip, trying not to beam like a moronic simpleton.
Randomly, I reached over, turned his head gently and kissed him.
“I love you, too.”
“That doesn’t make you want to run for the hills?” He asked with a wry smile.
I shook my head.
“No. You are stuck with me, Mr. Maxwell.”
“Well, Ms. Olivier,” His lips grazed mine for another sweet, gentle kiss, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
***

“What is this?” I asked Aisha. She was the wife of a man named Frank who worked on security with James. She was holding a tray out to me with one brilliantly red berry in the center. Even though the berry was very small, the silver metal of the tray around it seemed to fade in the shadow of its potent color.
“Is this what he was talking about?” James asked, and I looked between the two of them, befuddled as to what exactly it was that they were referring to. James suddenly seemed thrilled by the sight of the red berry, as though it was a coveted gift finally found under a crowded Christmas tree.
“What, dare I ask, was he talking about? Who is 'he?'” I asked.
“Don found these berries out in the woods. He was hungry so he ate some. Apparently, they have some really psychedelic side effects, if you know what I mean.” She grinned at me conspiratorially. In response to what she had said and the ridiculous look on her face, I frowned.
“You may find this shocking but I have absolutely no idea what you mean. Would you care to elaborate?”
“Weren't you just saying this afternoon that you wanted to relax?” James asked me.
“Yes, I do recall...” I stopped and turned back to him slowly. On my face was perhaps the most fiendishly evil glare I had ever utilized to deter him from a course of action.
“That's scary.” He told me nonchalantly.
“I know it is.” I snapped after crossing my arms over my chest. “Are you suggesting that we get high? James, we are not two college kids sitting in a dorm room trying to piss our time away.”
“Maybe not, but you could be a college kid. Is that enough?” He asked in an overly concerned tone that proved he was purposely trying to irritate me. My scowl darkened.
“I could slap that smirk right off of your face right now. Instead, I am simply going to put Penny to bed. Come along, Penelope.” I grasped her hand tightly in mine and huffed away.
“Just to verify, though, you won't be mad at me if I eat one?” He called after me. I was tempted to use a very vulgar hand gesture to answer that question. Instead, I ignored him.
“It is a strange day when you have to start asking someone questions like that...” I heard him mutter to Aisha.
Just before ascending the stairs, I turned back to see Don sitting at the far end of the room in a high-backed wooden chair. Behind his chair, a fire blazed in the grate; that light darkened the space around him. If ever there was a symbol of doom, that was it. I could have shouted a warning to the others. But in their eyes, I saw a need to consume the berries that were being offered to them. They wanted to let go.
I wanted to let go.
It had been several weeks since our arrival at Don's house. Though James and I were finding it easier to relax after getting to know so many kind people there, we still found it necessary to keep our eyes open and our heads clear at all times. We were not afraid of many in Don's house, but there were some that sought to please the man who ran the show. They, and the man himself, were worrisome folks.
But if I ate that berry, I would forget all of that trepidation and anxiety. I would forget how afraid I was for the lives of Penny, Violet, Elijah, and James. I would forget the regrets and sadness that attempted to plague me daily. My mind would empty and even out, quite wondrously...
“No.” I said out loud to sway my temptation. Only verbally could I express my desire to suppress the urge. Internally, I was craving whatever “psychedelic state” was brought on by the berry.
“But I didn't say I was actually going to do it!” Penny exclaimed as she looked up at me with wide, terrified eyes. “I just think it would be funny!”
“What did you say?” I looked down at her as we walked up the stairs.
“I didn't say anything. You heard me thinking about it!”
“What were you thinking about?”
She blinked up at me for several seconds.
“Nothing.”
I lost it. I was laughing hysterically and covering my mouth to stifle the sound. Her huge eyes looking up at me betrayed the guilt she felt at some fleeting thought she had only briefly mused on. I didn't even care what exactly it was that she thought would be humorous. It was more than likely an innocent prank that would cause no harm.
I did not stop laughing until after she was changed into her pajamas. I remembered how every night on Earth, I had always fought her to go to bed. At first, I had been stern, informing her that only one story would be read and then she would have to promptly go to sleep. Somehow, she always managed to get at least three stories out of me. By the time I turned her light off, we were giggling ridiculously at jokes no one else could possibly find funny. The memory warmed me and as I sat with her that night, stroking her hair until she fell asleep, I knew that we would be doing that bedtime routine forever.
I could have cried. The thought was more beautiful than any Pangaean sunset.
After she had drifted off into a peaceful slumber, I tucked the blankets in even more tightly around her. As always, I carefully eased my light weight off of the bed and slunk back away from her, watching her as she slept until I had reached the door. After closing it behind me, I walked back downstairs, still smiling to myself.
Batteries must have been found on the ship because I could hear an old White Stripes song playing boisterously in the living room downstairs. I knew that several people in the house had brought their portable iPod players with them from Earth. They had also brought batteries of their own. Some people were quite skilled at remembering every last necessity and convenience that they wished to bring with them on our collective, one-way journey.
Curiosity got the better of me. If I had simply gone to bed, I never would have tasted the sinfully sweet juice of the Peace Fruit. I would have never known the full extent of the activities Don allowed and encouraged to occur in his house.
“Brynna!” Violet's arms were around me the moment I walked into the room. She nestled her head against mine several times before rubbing her face into my neck. When her hair tickled my skin most irritatingly, I jerked away from her.
“Will you stop that?” I whispered fiercely to her after I had pulled away.
One look at her face and I could have murdered James and Elijah.
Her eyes were glowing with the same cerulean color of the juice that filled the red skins of those berries. The lazy smile that was spread across her face and the way her eyelids drooped every so often confirmed what I was dreading mentally: She had been offered that natural drug and instead of refusing, she had taken it.
“You love this song.” She said as she twirled a strand of my hair around her finger. “That's what James said! He loves you, Brynna...”
People all around the room were lounging in the elaborately designed furniture, laughing quietly and in some disturbing cases, caressing each other quite inappropriately. Don, for instance, was being fondled by one woman around his age and another around mine. They whispered of his bravery in sentences far too intricate for the intelligence level I knew they possessed. At one point, they muttered in a language they had never learned. His glowing blue eyes glazed over in both lust and satisfaction, quite to my bemusement. How he could emanate both at the same time, I was not sure.
I almost heaved forward at such a disgusting sight of human frailty. Perhaps I was being what most would call “a stick in the mud”, but their behavior was proof of their inferior standing to me. They had all allowed themselves to become high on a mysterious berry from the forest, simply so they could engage in conscience-free “relaxation.” I shuddered to think what would occur in that room.
“Don says that while the juice from these berries flowed through his veins, he saw the one God.” Violet informed me. Her eyes were rolling back in her head as her hands ran through her hair. The soft texture was enough to intoxicate her further.
What I was witnessing had to be quite close to the effects of ecstasy. Or perhaps LSD. My heart dropped heavily into my stomach when I recalled another drug, one that had been manufactured and outlawed immediately after an unfortunate issue arose involving cannibalism. Something about a bath... I could not remember. I prayed that the effects of the berries would not take a dark turn for the worse.
“You should have been here. Just as we were starting to feel the peace, Don told us that story. It was beautiful, Brynna.”
I frowned at her when abnormally large tears began to fall from her eyes.
“The world will be at peace, just like this right now, as long as Don lets us live. As long as we let people live. Live and let live.”
“Alright, this is ridiculous!” I grabbed her arm. Her over-dramatic gasp would have been quite comical had she not been genuinely horrified by me grabbing her so aggressively. She jerked her arm away and rubbed the spot where my hand-print was still visible.
“Ow...” She moaned with a terribly depressing frown on her face now, “Meanie, be nice.”
“That last statement was completely redundant and utterly puerile but then, I sincerely doubt that you remember the definitions of those fifth-grade level words.”
“So mean...” She sighed heavily and wiped a tear that had fallen from her eyes away. “I love you and you love me, too. We love each other even though we fight so much, Brynna. That doesn't matter. You're my sister and I love you. Even when you're mean...”
I exclaimed in irritation and then began to scold her in a shaking voice:
“Violet Mae, this kind of idealistic, drug-fueled rambling was not cute in the 1960's when those mindless people that called themselves hippies were spouting it off to people or to walls, whichever would listen. It most certainly is not cute now.”
“The walls are standing still. So still, like the core of Purissimus...”
I felt like a mother sent to pull her child from what the young people called a “rave.” I felt like at any moment, people would pull pacifiers from their pockets to suck on before waving glow-sticks in my face. Yes, I will admit that I was extinguishing the life of the party. But imagine for a moment stumbling across a group of people, both young and old, engaging in such reckless foolishness. Some, including Alice and Quinn, were beginning to remove their clothing. If there were ever a toxic environment from which I needed to forcibly extract my sister, I was standing in the dead-center of it.
I actually covered my eyes for a moment because I was so incredibly embarrassed for the people around me. When I looked up, Violet had swayed off into the crowd of those dancing by the open windows. The light from the fire was lower, creating a commanding darkness that I could scarcely see through. I became aware of smoke tickling the inside of my nose. While normal smoke would have burned my nasal passages, whatever that was only made me want to smile. I did not even want to sneeze.
The sweet smell of that smoke mixed with the wonderfully brisk evening air; the breeze gently stung my face as it flew by me. I found myself smiling as a lightness suddenly took hold of my heart. I was looking around, feeling the coolness of the night wrapped around me. I was reminded of the days at home on Earth when the summer had finally faded away into fall...
A quick stab of horror pierced my already fallen heart when I saw Don crush one of the berries on the table. As the light blue juice was exposed to the air, it seemed to fizzle. Afterward, where the liquid had been, there was only thick, black powder. I watched Don brush the dust into his hand and carefully siphon it into a pipe fashioned from the wood of one of the old trees in the forest. That intricately fashioned smoking device could only have been a gift from Adam. The pipe was far too excellent to be crafted by Don's hand.
After lighting the end of his pipe and inhaling deeply, Don blew the smoke into the older woman's open mouth.
My head was starting to spin. The dizziness that rattled my brain was not unpleasant, though. A memory from when I was three years old overtook me; I was on a merry-go-round, waving to my mother every time she came into my view around the bend. Elijah was beside me, riding a huge, black horse with yellow eyes. We were giggling the way children do, shouting to our mom and smiling for the camera she was holding up.
Why had I left her? My face was buried in my hands as the delightfully happy feeling that had accompanied the long lost memory died away. It was replaced by a regret so excruciating that I had to grasp my chest. Surely my heart would literally fall from my body. Surely, it would fall to the floor where I would see just how blackened it was from my years of hating her, my father, Maura, Michael...
James's hands gently grasped mine. As soon as he pulled them away from my face, his lips pressed to my forehead, my closed eyes, my nose and both of my cheeks.
Warmth. Luminescence. A desire that burned from my heart to between my legs so deliciously that I could have cried. All around us, people were standing up to leave. Soon, they would disappear into the rooms of the house where they would rectify their own erotic urges. Some were still just lounging, whispering to one another and laughing quietly to themselves.
What was the name of the song playing? I could scarcely remember the name of the band, too. A color, or the absence of color, and the word “Keys.” It was one of their songs that received little attention yet it was one of their best.
“Don't, man.” Elijah's voice said lazily and James let go of me. When his hands lost their grip, I expected to be filled with that ever-present ice again. Instead, I simply turned back to find him still there behind me, though now he was sitting on the couch with his head tilted back. I did not know where Elijah had gone.
Violet was in the crowd of people that I had wandered into, dancing slowly. As my heart twirled and spun in beautiful synchrony with my singing brain, I began to dance, too.
“Just a psychotic girl and I won't get lost in your world...”
As the women vocalizing in the background of the song intensified, I raised my hands to the ceiling, feeling so calm, so alive, so beautiful, so powerful...
James was watching me. The song was so true, he knew. He and I both knew that wisdom would tell him to stay away. But love was not wise. It was not even smart. It was just one of the many results that could occur when emotions won out over logic.
It is funny how when one is on drugs, suddenly the most random events pull together to form one cohesive whole tailor-made for the individual. Every song was written for that individual, every word spoken is about the individual, the universe was created for the individual… That individual is the hand of God, creating meaning, while simultaneously being the only thought in God’s mind. 
James could not stand to stay away. He could not bear the thought of losing me. I almost allowed tears to fall from my eyes when I realized that I felt the same way about him.
Watching me was too much for him. In a blur of movement, he was in front of me and scooping me off of my feet. I was so entranced by his expertly sensuous kisses that I did not realize we were leaving the room. It was a blissful feeling, to be mindless.
We were in one of the back rooms of the house. I could still hear the music playing clearly. Now, the song had changed. A band whose name was written in all capital letters. A singer with a raspy voice. An exclamation:
“SAIL.”
Our clothes were off and I was on top of him, my lips moving slowly down his firm body. His hand grasped hold of my long hair and pulled backwards. I was sitting in his lap, straddling him, but now, our sweating torsos were touching. I moaned out loud when his tongue grazed my neck in between each perfectly placed kiss. While I was so hypnotized by the erotic intensity his mouth on my skin brought forth inside of me, he pulled my hips forward abruptly, taking me, literally and figuratively, by surprise.
I exclaimed at the feeling, almost in tears from the fierce pleasure of it. From the top of my head to the ends of my feet, I burned delightfully in desire to reach what I knew would be an utterly world-shattering conclusion. And yet, I wanted to experience the brilliantly agonizing, gradual ascent to that ending. After my head tilted back, his mouth moved down to my chest that was rising and falling with my deep breaths. By then, I was not moaning in ecstasy anymore; I was crying in sensual delirium.
When his deep voice saying my name echoed around in my ears, I grasped his shoulders and moved even more quickly. Nothing else in the entire world could possibly exist. Time had stopped. The Peace Fruit summoned images of the two of us, alone in a paradise as old as any world. Heaven, Nirvana, and tangible serenity... I might have seen Hell, too, but it was beautiful.
I did not have to worry about the entire house hearing the loud hybrid of a moan and a scream that escaped me just before I collapsed onto him. Tears were streaming down my face as we both gasped for breath. All around the house, my enhanced hearing picked up the animal grunts and moans of those engaged in similar activities. Our only response to the sound was hysterical laughter; James and I laughed until we cried.
Another song was playing, starting slowly, guitars intermixed with a techno beat. Whomever had brought his or her iPod was my musical sister or brother, because the song was yet another I knew and loved, but in the moment, could not name. I felt an almost tangible connection that linked me to person supplying the beautiful music I loved to the rest of us. Regardless of one’s beliefs about different genres of music, music in general truly does pull us together, and in that night, we all felt it in our hearts and souls. It was linking us all together, making us one cohesive whole. Those songs had been written for us, in the same way that the universe had been built for us.
“Are we human / Or are we denser? / My sign is vital / My hands are cold / And I’m on my knees / Looking for the answer / Are we human? Or we denser?” 
The moon was streaming through the window, and I was not wiping the tears of completely random, completely heavenly joy that were falling from my eyes as I reached into the beam and felt the light caressing my skin. James reached out, too, feeling it and laughing with me. Before I could blink, he had lifted me, and I was sitting on the wide, cushioned window-ledge with my legs draped over his shoulders, my head tilted back, and my mouth open slightly as I breathed in slowly, deeply, moaning, once his face was burrowed between my legs. The moon’s light was all around us, cradling us.
“Will your system be alright / when you dream of home tonight…”
My back pressed to the wonderfully chilled glass of the window as his hands came up to grasp mine.
“…There is no message we’re receiving / let me know is your heart still beating?”
His hands grasped my hips, and he pulled me towards him at the same time that he was coming up to rest his knees on the window-ledge in front of me. My legs were still on his shoulders, and after entering me with a powerful thrust, it took both of us mere minutes to reach the same earth-shattering conclusion we had reached only moments before, it seemed. As I moaned out his name, and he made a noise between a carnal grunt and a moan, I reached up and pulled him to me. His heaving chest was pressed to mine, and after a moment, he slid down to nuzzle his face into my chest a few times before resting his cheek in between my breasts. 
“Oh, my God…” He said, and I thought he might be crying, so I laughed hysterically again. “Where did you come from? You weren’t here a few months ago, and now you’re here, and I love you, and I should say you’re too young for me, and I might have something wrong with me for loving you, but I don’t care… I just love you, and want you, and I think I’m laughing now…”
He was laughing. We both were. All the limbs of our sweating, gasping bodies were entwined together, tied in indecipherable knots; my leg was over his, my foot rubbing up and down the back of his calf, and his was wrapped around my back, grasping the back of my hand on the other side of my body. It should have been uncomfortable, but it was not. Everything was perfect. 
Perhaps our behavior was anything but morally upstanding. Perhaps succumbing to the force of the Peace Fruit was weak on our parts. But imagine for a moment exactly how wondrous total emptiness was for myself, James, my brother, sister, and housemates. After all we had fought to survive, we were allowed just one night of wild frivolity. James and I were allowed a night of the most mind-numbing pleasure imaginable. We'll call it our celebration, our way to show our gratitude to ourselves for all we had overcome.
When we awoke the next morning, I was still lying on top of him. In his deep slumber, he had turned us sideways to lie on the window-seat. His arms had not released me. Someone, who had gotten an embarrassing view of both mine and James's naked bodies, had covered us with a blanket. I cringed in humiliation and ran my fingers through my sweat-drenched hair.
Those who had built the house had knowledge on indoor plumbing, it seemed. Every room had a shower that ran with hot and cold water. I awoke James, and we walked up to our room, wrapped in the same blanket. We closed the bathroom door behind us. Penny, I was pleased to see, was sleeping peacefully still. The unsavory actions committed by us and the people in our house had not awoken her. For that, I was thankful.
My body was still weak from the erotic intensity of the night before. As the gloriously hot water poured over our skin, I clung to James and buried my face in his chest. The wildflower shampoo smelled divine, like the promise made by God regarding heaven coming to Earth. I almost moaned in ecstasy as I massaged that thick, sweet-smelling slop against my scalp. My nerve endings were still on high alert; they were heightened even in response to the simplest of pleasures.
Breakfast was not due for another two hours, given the position of the sun. James and I seemed to be the first people who had risen from the deep sleep that followed the intoxication. After dressing in clean clothes that smelled of home, we walked, hand in hand, down the hallway.
“We need to find Violet.”
“Are you worried? Don't be worried.” James told me.
“I am quite worried. I neglected my responsibilities last night, and I can only pray that she did not pay a price for my ignorance.”
The way Lucien did, my mind taunted cruelly. I stopped walking and pressed my hand to my forehead. I wished that I could reach into my skull and strangle my sadistic conscience.
“Hey...” James whispered. He let go of my other hand so that he could place both of his on my face. “We're happy, baby. Last night was one of the best nights of my life.”
“You mean the drug-fueled moral depravity or the earth-shaking sex?” I asked after pressing the top of my head against his chest.
“Both. Tell me that you didn't enjoy that last night.”
“I enjoyed the latter substantially. I wish that the former had not occurred.”
“You torment yourself over everything. Maybe we should have become Bachums.” He told me as we continued walking. “I'm glad that you ate the Peace Fruit last night. For the first time in your life, you finally let go.”
“How do you know it was the first time in my life? I actually have a very sordid history with street drugs.”
“Oh, yeah? Which?” 
“Peyote.”
“Oh, my God!” He exclaimed, laughing.
 “It was nice. Not the peyote. The Peace Fruit.” I said with a slight smile, “It was so peaceful.”
“That's why it's called Peace Fruit, my love.”
“Whatever it is called, I will not be doing that for a very long time. I sincerely doubt that I will ever do it again.”
“We'll see about that.”
I scowled at him in jocular scorn.
“That 'Peace Fruit' as you call it, could be used as Rohypnol.” I told him, “Given your stalking tendencies, I would not be surprised if you were alright with that.”
“With forcibly drugging you?! Jesus, baby! That’s intense. But I guess now is a good time to tell you about the time I bought Rohypnol outside of a bar in New York. There was this stunningly beautiful young woman with an evil glint in her eye sitting and watching the other patrons in the bar disdainfully...”
I punched him lightly in the arm as he laughed raucously at his own joke.
“It would not surprise me!”
“Oh, baby, you know I'm just messing with you!”
I was walking ahead of him when he grasped my hand and pulled me back to him. In a quick movement, he dipped me backwards and kissed me passionately. When his mouth finally broke from mine, I looked up at him, trying to suppress a smile.
“Why are you bending me over like this?”
“Bending you over...” He repeated in exaggerated intrigue, “I'm going to show you bending you over..”
“Oh, really?” I grinned up at him, “You have my full permission to show me exactly what you're talking about.”
“Say no more.”
Without taking his eyes off of mine, he kicked backwards, sending a door to one of the many closets in the house flying open. There were two screams from within. James and I both jumped and shouted in surprise when five of our housemates came stumbling out into the hallway without a scrap of clothing on any of their bodies.
James was staring, wide-eyed and mouth open, in absolute horror. The look on his face and the situation as a whole had me doubled over, clutching my stomach as I laughed. My arms reached out and grasped James as I struggled to stand upright.
“Baby, this is so disturbing... I think we need to move out...” James muttered as he shook his head back and forth. I only laughed harder.
“Stop!” I grasped my stomach with one hand and wiped the tears from my eyes with the other, “This is so ridiculous! Oh, God or Gods... I cannot take it!”
“Sorry, guys.” An English man said. He was trying to hide his lower appendage from our view with both hands. “Closet's free now.”
“Oh, that's gross!” James exclaimed in genuine revulsion.  
“Come on, honey.” I managed to say through my laughter, “You were so eager to show me how you were going to bend me over, and now the closet is free! How convenient!”
“I see your point of view on the Peace Fruit now.” James told me as he rubbed his eyes. “You win, baby.”
The uncontrollable giggles that shook my entire body only intensified.
“It's not funny!” He exclaimed finally, “I feel violated!”
Alice and Quinn stumbled out of their room, cracking up just as I was.
“What are you two so happy about? If you knew the horrors we have just seen...” James shook his head again.
“What are you so happy about, Brynna?” Quinn asked me to purposely avoid the question he had just been asked by James.
“Oh, human tendencies, of course.” I replied as we descended the stairs, “Have either of you seen Violet?”
“Yeah. She and Nick were sneaking past our door about an hour ago.” Alice answered, “That was a good time last night, wasn't it?”
I stopped in my tracks, my laughter ceasing quickly as though it had never existed in the first place.
“I swear, if my sister and that boy are having intercourse, I am going to castrate him with a dull sewing needle!”
The stifled laughter of Alice, Quinn, and James told me that my outburst was a tad over the top.
“I choose to ignore your laughter at my emotional torment! She is seventeen and has only known him for a few months.” I scowled as James's thoughts entered my mind, “You know what, I am aware that that statement is hypocritical! Actually, it is not. You and I have known each other for longer, and...”
More of his thoughts invaded my brain. I wondered briefly if he was assailing me with them purposely.
“I know that we had sex after only...” I stopped and threw up my hands in irritation, “You know what, I get enough of your sarcasm when you speak. I do not need to hear it telepathically, as well. So shut up, James!”
“And there it is!” James commentated happily, to the delight of Alice and Quinn.
That aforementioned vulgar hand gesture? James got two.
***

When I found Violet and Nick, they were lying in the dew-covered grass out in front of the house. They were on their sides facing each other and grasping hands. In the blue light of a new dawn, I could see the affection in their eyes. In my sister, I saw the same lightness of love that was present in my own eyes every time I looked at James.
I should have been happy for her. Instead, I lost my temper.
“Get up!” I snapped at her, and several feet away, in the tree line, a trio of birds took flight. I kid you not, my anger even startled the still half-asleep wildlife.
Nick immediately jumped up, stammering as he attempted to explain exactly what he and my sister were doing lying side by side on the front lawn as the sun began to rise. After the night of indulgence, I dared not speculate how far their affection had carried them. I shuddered to imagine that Violet had moved from infatuation to a physical romance with the young man.
“Brynna, just don't, alright? You were actually cool last night. You were chilled out and having a good time. Why do you want to spoil it?” Violet asked as she slowly rose onto her feet. “More importantly, why do you want to ruin this for me?”
“If my one concern in life was to achieve a social status of 'coolness,' I would die miserably unfulfilled almost certainly.”
“Yes,” Violet nodded with her eyebrows raised, “You would.”
“Be quiet, for the sake of all deities and Gods!” I covered my face for a moment with a shaking hand. “I understand that he is quite handsome and...”
“...and he's a nice guy who protects me and likes me.” She added, “What more do you need to know? I don't ask questions about you and James. I trust your judgment.”
“I swear, it was a simple two-word command. Be quiet. I do not believe that it is a difficult direction to follow. What occurred here last night is not to be repeated ever again. The consequences of such mindless frivolity will rear their ugly heads. That much is certain.”
“What do you mean?” Violet asked, and she was completely serious all of a sudden. “Did you see something? What is it, Brynn?”
“I did not see anything. But I feel trouble brewing, and that is plenty. Now, if you two had... had...”
James had walked up beside me as I struggled to say the word. I was not a prude, as I am sure you have gathered, but when it came to my sister, I was simply not comfortable discussing carnal matters with her. The awkwardness would surely be the death of me.
“James, will you take her for a walk before her head explodes?” Violet asked him, “Seriously, man. Listen to her stammering. She's like a robot that just got water thrown on it. Help me out.”
James chuckled as he wrapped his arm around my shoulder.
“Just for the record, Brynn, that didn't happen!” Violet called to me.
As enough distance was put between Violet and me, I looked up at James.
“She is being truthful, isn't she?”
James kissed my head and grinned.
“I don't know, baby. Is she?”
I scowled at him in fury. He was toying with my emotions and turning my concern into a joke. I certainly was not laughing.
“I am just ecstatic that my worrying over my sister's choices in life is entertaining you. Believe me when I say that I have yearned my entire life to amuse someone with my anxiety.”
“Let me assure you, my dear Brynna, that your anxiety neither amuses nor saddens me. Merely, I am befuddled by it, for the sake of all deities and Gods.” I glared at him even more scornfully, “See? That was another one of my attempts to talk like you.” His lips pressed to mine in an obnoxiously over-the-top kiss. “You are quite humorous.”
“You are quite aggravating.” I pulled away from him, “And the all-access pass you have been enjoying in regards to my body? Consider it expired.”
I walked ahead of him, smiling slightly to myself. I heard him chuckle but then, the sound slowly died away.
“Wait, are you being serious?”
“I do not know, baby.” I replied as Frank held the front door open for me. “Am I?”
All whimsy evaporated when my eyes met Frank's. A sudden wave of emotion came over me; in the depths of the tidal mass, I saw fear, grief, and fury. James, seeing my body tense as though I had just received a physical blow, was at my side in a blink.
“What is it?” I asked Frank quietly.
Instinct was driving me forward before I could hear his answer. I was hurtling up the steps two at a time. My heart raced in frenzied terror, sensing that something terrible had just occurred. The Peace Fruit... It brought out the worst in those who succumbed to its twisting, smooth-as-silk vines...
Every dark desire of man could be achieved while one was intoxicated by its juices. The conscience disappeared, and the most vulgar, despicable acts could be carried out without fear of guilt. I had known that to be true even as I allowed myself to lapse deeply into the blissful hypnosis. Even as I did not fear the crash on hard earth that would surely result from the high, I could not avoid the trepidation felt when imagining what might await me as I fell. Now, I would see it firsthand.
She had awoken just after James and I had crept from the room. She had been rubbing her still-heavy eyes as her little feet pattered against the cold hardwood floor of the hallway. The white curtains billowed in the early morning breeze, but she walked through with ease, paying them no mind. It had been the smell of blood that had jolted her to full alertness. A door had been left ajar just beside where she was standing. Her childish curiosity had pulled her forward. Her hand had pushed open the door. The man was still in there, standing over the two bodies, his eyes not as blue as blindness...
“Brynna...” Frank's voice said behind me, “James, stop her!”
“Where is she?” I was muttering, unable to raise my voice above a crackling whisper. People gaped at me as I walked by and whispered behind their hands.
“That's her sister...”
“She's more like her mother than anything...”
“God, poor girl...”
“Where is she?!” I was able to speak loudly now as my eyes darted wildly around the hallway. I clawed and pushed my way through the gawking crowd of spectators. Up ahead, I heard her animal grunts, hisses, and even a feeble roar.
“Brynna, it was not his fault. It was the Peace Fruit...” Don was beginning to say, “Listen, we cannot judge him for what he did. That's not what we're about here...”
I pushed Don Abba with so much force that he was thrown several feet away. The door to that same room Penny had walked into was closed. The sound of nails running down the length of the wood on the other side sounded.
“Don't go in there!” Don exclaimed, “They're not supposed to change this young! We don't know what's wrong with her!”
I threw open the door to reveal the dimly lit, blood-splattered room. Inconveniently, the sun rose on the other side of the house. Its light had not yet reached the dark space before my eyes. The effect of such darkness was eerie, especially given the circumstances.
“Penny?” I whispered, and my eyes changed over to white. Even with my enhanced vision, I could not see her. A man was breathing laboriously on the floor, barely alive but still so far from death. He was the same man I had seen through Penny's terrified eyes. The claw marks on his body were neatly cut from his forehead to his chin, but as they moved down his torso, they sunk deeper and as a result, his flesh was torn sloppily.
“Penny?” I looked around frantically for her. In the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of movement dart under the bed. Outside, the onlookers gasped and grabbed onto one another in horror and also, perverted, voyeuristic excitement.
“Come on, baby. That's enough.” I forced the eruption of fear inside of my chest to calm. I needed to emanate warmth and serenity for her. Her killer instincts were switched on, and she would not come to me while I was afraid. The animal inside of her would only be soothed by the maternity I carried for her. Only through my motherly affection would she be soothed.
“James, mellow out.” I hissed at him over my shoulder.
“What?” James whispered back, “What the hell are you talking about right now? I'm just going to reach under and grab her!”
“No! She's not herself. Calm yourself down.”
“Are you still high?!”
I scowled at him and barked in a furious whisper when I spoke:
“Shut up and do what I say!”
“Well, shit, you asked me so nicely, why would I not do that?” He rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, standing perfectly still. He opened one eye to look at me. “I can't do it when you're staring at me like that!”
“Fine, I will look away.”
I did. A long moment of silence.
“This is stupid.”
“Goddamn it, James!” I exclaimed loudly.
There was another loud flutter of movement under the bed and a roar that was a little stronger.
“Alright, I'm doing it.” James told me, “I'm calming down. You win.”
I felt the peace wash over him. It was natural, another positive perk of our evolution. That serenity radiated through the air and wrapped tightly around Penny like a soft baby blanket. Together, our combined tranquility coaxed her from her hiding place.
Consider it Pangaean parenting.
Her huge brown eyes met ours as she scampered to us. Her tiny arms wrapped around my neck as my own grasped her tightly. James encased us in his strong embrace. Outside in the hallway, I heard some of the onlookers clapping. I could have lit them all on fire with the look I cast their way.
Penny moved so that she could hold onto James. Her soft whimpers began as she buried her face in his neck.
“Shh...” James whispered. He kissed her head as we moved through the crowd. I kept my hand on her back as I scowled at Don.
“Come on. Everything's okay, baby.” James was telling her softly, “Brynn and I are right here.”
I did not need an expert on forensics to explain to me what had occurred. The man had killed two women while under the influence of the Peace Fruit. Penny had stumbled upon him as he stood over their mutilated bodies. In a quick move to eradicate all witnesses, he had attacked her, thinking that she would be easily dispatched. Unfortunately for him, he had not realized that the same powers that we were slowly grasping had begun to take hold of my sister, as well. She had killed him to defend herself.
James laid Penny down on the bed and muttered to me that he was going to run her a bath. He kissed my forehead before he walked away. Furiously, I began to wipe the blood from Penny's face, cringing as several drops came close to rolling into her eyes. Her soft cries of terror clawed my heart viciously. Only rage could bandage those wounds. I was far beyond angry. My rage extended to so many different people, I could barely keep their faces straight. James's handsome face dissolved into Don's and then to Adam's. I saw my mother, who would have such cutting words to say about the incident; I saw Maura, who was not there... I rubbed my temples as my head pounded.
When James reappeared to tell me the bath was ready, I scooped Penny up and pushed past him furiously. When he attempted to follow me in to the bathroom, I slammed the door in his face and turned the lock. I listened as he rattled the doorknob.
Penny had suffered minimal physical wounds. A few scratches on her skin were the worst of the damage. A small raised bump on her forehead was little cause for concern. The man's blood swirled around her in the steaming bathwater. Even the lavender and wildflower infused soap could not erase his smell. I hummed softly to her, attempting to soothe her with my voice. The song and the soap were lulling her to sleep. By the time I wrapped a towel around her, her cries had stopped, and her eyes were drooping. Her head nestled under mine as I carried her back out into the bedroom.
“Vamoose.” I muttered to James after I had moved to the dresser beside the window.
“I know you're pissed off, but for the life of me, Brynna, I cannot decipher exactly what I did to you this time.” He whispered back angrily.
“Take your self-righteous indignation out into the hallway.” I raised my voice to a conversational volume but did not betray my disgust and rage to him just then. I would not show my anger in front of Penny. I would not argue with James in front of her the way my mother and father had fought viciously in front of Elijah, Violet, and me.
“Don't even start this shit with me. After what happened...”
I sat down on the bed and looked over my shoulder at him.
“Go.” I ordered firmly. My eyes were set in steely resolve.
“I am getting really sick of your bullshit. Just so you know.”
The door slammed behind me. I wanted to follow him, screaming until my lungs were devoid of air about showing his childish anger in front of my sister while she was so upset. However, if I were to do that, it would be quite hypocritical. The whole statement would be rendered moot by my own immature show of rage. I dressed Penny quietly, shushing her when her cries began again.
“What happened?!” Violet and Elijah had come running in.
“Be quiet!” I snapped at them before looking back at Penny. She was looking at me with big, terrified eyes. Tears streamed from them down her round cheeks again. I pressed my lips to her forehead and continued stroking her hair. I held my hand out behind me and mimed silently for Elijah and Violet to stay away until she was asleep. They obeyed.
The terrible events of the early morning had taken their toll on her. The physical exertion of what she had done had exhausted her body. The terror of killing a living being had wrung her young mind dry. What she needed more than anything was a long sleep. When she awoke, we would deal with the after-effects of such a terrifying occurrence.
My sister was five years old when she killed a man. It had been in self-defense and because she was changing early. I would remind her of that every day. Every day, her mind would find that evil man, and she would succumb to a guilt far beyond her years. I prayed to a God in whom I did not believe every night that she would forget his face. But every morning that followed, I would realize, begrudgingly and with fury in my heart, that my prayers had gone unanswered.
Don and James were talking furiously at the top of the stairs that led to our floor. I approached them, listening in on the conversation before they noticed my presence.
“Things got out of control, and for that, I apologize.” Don was saying quickly, “Those two women will be buried, but Donovan must be saved.”
“He tried to kill her! He tried to kill a five-year-old girl!”
“We cannot hold him accountable for what he did.”
“He wasn't even high, Don! Where is your head at right now?!”
“I do not judge people for what they do. I can't, James. That would go against everything I believe in! When I brought people here, I promised them a place to live where they would not be judged.”
“You can't be serious! He raped and killed two women! He tried to kill Penny! What kind of message is this going to send to your people? You're going to let them believe that you tolerate rape and murder?!”
“Precisely. Humans are inbred with dark desires. We all have them, James. You can't deny that. I cannot hold Donovan responsible for doing exactly what I said I would allow.”
“You said you would allow assault and...”
“No. I said that there would be no rules. This is a consequence of that notion, but every great society has moments of downfall.”
“So, this is a great society now? That's what this is about?”
I had approached them. Don's expression soured upon seeing my face. I scowled at him darkly, my heart racing in rage at all he had said.
“This is not a great society, Don. This is a circus.” I spat at him, “You will hold that abhorrent pig responsible for what he did to my sister. If he had killed her, I would have destroyed him. In fact, I will still kill him for what he did!”
“You most certainly will not!” Don shot at me, “Two wrongs do not make a right, Brynna, and I will thank you to remember that!”
“I will rip his body apart. If I could also consume his despicable soul, you can bet your life that I would! If I could steal from him whatever eternal salvation awaits us when we depart this world, I would!”
“I might not have any rules for you to follow, Brynna, but you will not touch him.” Don ordered in fury, “I might not like order, but as long as we are all living here, we will not harm each other.”
“He killed two women! He tried to kill my sister! That is harming people, is it not? Where do those events fit in your idealistic world of bullshit?!”
Yes. I cursed.
“Get yourself under control before you come downstairs.” His eyes glared into mine, “James, you are responsible for her. If anything happens, I will throw all of you out. Is that understood?”
“We are leaving! And he most certainly is not responsible for me!” I exclaimed angrily before storming away.
“You can't leave! There's no safe place out there for you, Brynna! Your father is looking for you! He has a bounty on your head! You have nowhere to go!”
“Ignore her. She's just having one of her little girl tantrums.” James told him loudly as he leaned against the wall.
I turned around, walked up to him, and slapped him so hard across the face that Don gasped.
“What the f—” James started to say, but I hit him again.
“I am already livid. My fury is directed right at you. Do not tempt me to commit violent acts. Do you understand me?!” I growled furiously after my eyes had turned red.
“Let me tell you something, you crazy...” James began.
I turned and huffed away before opening and closing the door to Violet's room. Her suitcases were still lying on the floor, only half-empty. We had been in Don's house for weeks and still, she had not unpacked completely. I wondered if perhaps she was wary of staying, or if she knew that I would make us leave. For a moment, my heart jolted in guilt. How could I uproot their lives when I knew how much they loved living there?
Because two women were killed and those other people in the house enjoyed recklessly and publicly indulging their most carnal inclinations. Because heavy drug use was not only allowed, it was encouraged. What more did I need to know?
The door to the room slammed, and James stormed up to me. His hands grasped my upper arms painfully as he spun me to face him.
“That is enough!” He snarled with his face close to mine, “You are not going anywhere. Your father wants you dead. If he gets you alive, there is no saying what he'll do to you! I am not going to have that on my conscience. Have I made myself perfectly clear?!”
“Do you really think that I am going to obey your orders like I am some intellectually insufficient, pitifully smitten schoolgirl, James Maxwell!? I will not stay here another day, and you will not follow me! What happened to Penny is your fault! You were high, and you were not there for her!”
“Newsflash, sweetheart, neither were you!”
I swung my fist up to hit him, but he grasped my wrist firmly. Beneath his fingers, the bone began to break. I barely winced.
“Hit me again, and watch what happens.” He warned me, and now his eyes were blazing red, too.
“Let go of me!” I shouted at him before pushing him with my free hand. “If I had not been going downstairs to check on you, I never would have breathed in that smoke! It is your fault that I wasn't there for Penny! You were so recklessly stupid! You were so childish, wanting to get high because all of your stupid friends were! You are so stupid, James!”
The hand I was pushing him with flew up to slap him again. That was when whatever fragile hold he had on his anger was lost. That was when whatever remaining juice from the Peace Fruit that was flowing through his veins whispered angrily to him that he had to defend his physical health and his masculinity.
James had been gifted with great strength. As a result, in a physical fight, he would inflict great damage on me. I wished that I had remembered that, but it was too late by the time I realized it.
His arms wrapped around me and lifted my small body up. Then, he slammed me down hard on Violet's bed. Despite the thick padding between the two coverings, my back hit the hardwood floor beneath the bed.
Do you remember how I described to you the feeling of one cornered? Well, when James pinned my arms above my head with one of his hands, I fought with that same desperate, mindless, intensity. I forgot the notion of suppressing my fear in order to avoid being seen as weak. I screamed and kicked him. I lunged forward, trying to sink my teeth down into his throat. Nothing, not even my best effort, could successfully subdue or even weaken him.
He was hissing insults at me through his clenched teeth. If he was to be believed, I was a female dog, a morally loose female, and a mental patient. Most disgustingly, he spat out a derogatory slang term for a woman's lower anatomy once or twice. I fought to free myself from his grasp, all the while bracing for the moment when his fists began to rain hard, excruciating blows upon me. I had fought my father just like that so many times. I could not believe that the man I loved was capable of the same cruelty.
“James, stop it!” I screamed after dodging the first punch he threw at me, “JAMES! STOP!”
The second punch landed hard on my jaw.
I was horrified to see that his eyes had dissolved back into that deep blue of the fruit's juice. Somehow, the Peace Fruit (so stupidly named) still held him in its grasp.
His free hand was tugging at my sweatpants in a struggle to pull them down.
“James, please don't! James, please stop!”
Consider it shameless. Consider it weak. I know that I do still. I was almost in tears as I begged him. I was unable to picture any scenario more horrendous than James, whom I loved so incredibly much, assaulting me in the most terrible and unforgivable way.
“James! Please, honey, this isn't you! JAMES!”
His teeth sunk down into my shoulder. I landed a perfect kick between his legs, and his jaws released. We both howled in pain together.
“Honey, please! James, stop!” I whispered to him as he gathered himself back up. I was struggling to free my wrists from his firm grasp again. “Look at me. James, honey, look at me!”
The door came crashing down. James looked up, and his grip released. I swung my fists up in a fury and managed to hit him several times in the face. I did not care who had arrived just in the nick of time. I only wanted to inflict as much physical damage on James as I could for what he had just attempted.
Of all the people on Pangaea, Adam was my “rescuer.” He shouted over his shoulder, presumably at Violet, Alice, and Quinn to stay back. Terrified, they nodded and shrunk away. Adam threw James backwards, shouting in a language unknown to our kind. Even in my state, shock registered upon hearing James shout back at him in the same tongue. The evolution apparently had intellectual side effects beyond what I had previously believed.
James’s new strength was a force to be reckoned with. But Adam had lived for thousands of years with the same power and as a result, even my boyfriend did not stand a chance against him. Adam threw James back into the wall, shouting still and trembling in a rage that could have shook the ground beneath our feet. They fought for several minutes, and I laid on the bed, curled up in a ball, shaking with sobs that never came. Tears brimmed on my eyes as I buried my face in my hands, but I did not shed them. Still, even after all that had just happened, I could not cry.
“Don’t hurt him…” I managed to gasp out when James gave a shout of pain.
I loved him still. I knew that he was not himself. Sure, he would have to deal with my terrible anger while he won back my trust. I wondered briefly if he would even try to resolve the issues that were now standing firmly between us. A tugging part of my cynical heart told me he would not, and I didn’t know if I cared or not. 
“Adam, stop!” I shouted after turning over onto my side to look at him.
Adam looked back at me before grabbing a hold of James’s shirt and hauling him over to the door of Violet’s bedroom. With an almighty thrust, he threw him into the hallway.
“Elijah!” I screamed when my brother immediately went for his throat, roaring in protective rage.
“Don’t!” Adam shouted deafeningly. The house trembled in fear at the sound. Elijah hissed at Adam but released his grip on James. I did not see James run.
Other people had gathered in the doorway, thirsting for a show of drama. A front row seat was coveted by all; their lives had no meaning, I decided. They needed to witness theatrical events in order to feel fulfilled. Perhaps they even held themselves in higher regard as they watched me, knowing their lives had not taken such a traumatic turn, even after they had been high. Only through noble actions of their own were they spared from experiencing my pain.
Adam’s hands, so rough in texture but so gentle in movement, pulled my pants up. I covered my face, feeling the skin of my cheeks burning in a humiliation so toxic, I believed it would be the poison that ended me. I could not understand his words, for he was speaking in his language, but his tone was gentle, soothing. The beast of Pangaea was trying to calm me.
“Make them go away.” I whispered to him.
Instead, he picked me up with ease and ran from the room. I closed my eyes, feeling the air whizzing past me as he bolted from the house, over the lawn and into the trees. When he laid me down in a soft patch of grass beneath a towering oak, I looked up at him.
In the mid-morning sun that shined through the trees, the color of his eyes seemed to glow. Reflected back at me, I saw both a fearful concern and a desire to quiet the thunderous emotional storm inside of me. His hand rested on my face as he leaned down to kiss my forehead tenderly. His lips moved down my face, pressing to both of my still burning cheeks, my nose, and both of my closed eyes. Just as his mouth stopped to hover above mine, he pulled away.
“I do apologize,” He muttered after looking away from me, “I have allowed my human side to get the better of me.”
I shook my head and sat up quickly. 
“Thank you.” I said without a scrap of actual gratitude in my voice. Perhaps it was an old habit unable to die, but I still could not trust him completely. In fact, I could not trust him at all. He had saved me in the interest of a motivation that was not clear to me. His tenderness from a moment earlier was simply meant to make me drop my guard.
“I know that you do not trust me, Brynna, and for that, I am very sorry. I did not present myself to you as I should have. Killing your people was an action on my part that was not pondered through completely. I did not think of the consequences. I only thought of Purissimus.”
“Did you encourage Don to eat the Peace Fruit?” I asked.
“Yes. I did.”
“Why?”
“Such reckless indulgence is so fitting of his persona, is it not?”
“I suppose so. I would just like you to be aware of the consequences. My younger sister killed a man today. That man had assaulted and murdered two women. Penny caught him in the act. A few others have died, though I do not know how. I only know that they have been killed.”
“Some went willingly. The Peace Fruit enhances that which will invoke a state of peace, hence the name. For some, that peace could only be achieved in death. They wanted to escape all that is happening here.”
“If you had left us alone…”
“My reasoning behind this war will make itself evident to you in time.”
“I doubt that sincerely.”
“I am sure you do. Just know this, Brynna: I am not your enemy. Your disgusting male partner may plant distrust of me in your mind, but it is a lie.”
“Another consequence of you encouraging Don to give us drugs was what James did to me. His eyes were still blue.”
“Yes. The Peace Fruit has been known to cause grisly after-effects in those who ingest it.”
“I have an idea, Adam and it is a very admirable one.”
“I would love to hear it.”
My eyes darkened as I looked at him. My voice trembled with fury as I spoke.
“Stay away from me. Stay away from my sisters and brother. Stay away from the house. Slink back into your city, and live out your miserable, immortal existence far from us. Stop interfering in our lives and tempting us with things we do not need. I do not care about your reasoning. It will not become clear to me, because I will not think of it for even one moment.”
I expected my own anger to come back at me, swinging wildly and in indignation. I expected, at the very least, a flash of hurt in his eyes. But alas, I must have forgotten briefly with whom I was dealing.
Adam chuckled softly, and a chill swirled down my spine. He leaned forward and ran his finger down the length of my face.
“Your anger is admirable. Your spirit is strong. I find you fascinating, Brynna Olivier.”
“I find you aggravating,” I smacked his hand away, “Do not touch me.”
I stood and turned to run back to the house.
“I wish you the best of luck in repairing what has been broken between you and your mate. He loves you very much.” Adam said as he followed after me.
“Why are you walking behind me?” I turned around to walk backwards. I did not like being in his presence and not having my eyes fixed on him at all times. As I have said, I did not trust him or his unsavory intentions.
“I am seeing you home.”
“I do not need you to see me home.” I replied irritably.
“Believe me when I say that you do.” He smiled arrogantly.
“What is it with stalking men? Do you have no pride in yourself? I believe my message to you just now was very clear. Can you not gather that I want nothing more to do with you?”
“Consider that fact gathered, my dear.”
I turned back around and rolled my eyes skyward. I could not imagine a man more annoying. I could not imagine a man more intimidating. The two traits were strange in their coexistence.
When we reached the house, I opened the front door, ignoring the stares of those who had clearly been awaiting my return. Just as I stepped inside, his hand grasped my wrist gently. I shuddered as a warm, tickling sensation traveled slowly up my arm. When his other hand took my other wrist, the same feeling took hold. The two currents ran until they finally joined together at my wounded shoulder. I closed my eyes as I felt the skin mesh back together, knowing that the evidence of the gaping bite-marks had been erased.
“Your wrists were broken.”
Adam’s voice snapped me out of my drunken daze.
“Your shoulder was still bleeding, also. You will find them all as strong as the day you were born. Goodbye, my beauty.”
He zoomed off across the field, gone from my sight as quickly as he had emerged. As the effects of his healing power wore off, I registered what he had called me. I exclaimed loudly and stomped my foot in disgust. I hated him. I hated how his nature baffled me. Whatever armor guarded his heart could not be breached even by my most stinging rejection. Instead of musing for hours on such an annoyingly frustrating tendency, I silently resolved to find another way. Surely, there was some way to hurt him.
When I returned to my room, Penny was still asleep. Violet, Elijah, Alice, and Quinn were waiting for me, but I quickly shooed them away. I needed peace and quiet. I needed to sleep as my sister was.
“We will talk about this when I wake up. I need some time alone.”
“Brynna, I’ll kill him when he gets back…”
“You will do nothing of the sort. Goodnight.” I closed the door and walked slowly back to the bed. I laid down beside Penny, not even bothering to change my clothes or cover myself with the thick, animal-skin blanket.
I just closed my eyes.
***

A note from Violet was on the nightstand, placed right where my eyes would fall when they opened. She and Elijah had taken Penny downstairs to get some food. Don said that I was excused from work responsibilities for the day. She loved me. I sighed and rolled my eyes to the sky. What a terribly odd situation…
I moved into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Over the rushing water, I did not hear the door open, but I did feel his presence in the room. I did hear his rapidly beating heart. My body braced for a physical blow or his rough hands throwing me down onto the floor. I was prepared to fight him to the death if he tried to hurt me the way he had earlier in the day. It would break my heart, quite literally, to hurt or kill him. But I would not be assaulted so terribly again.
Instead of pain, though, I felt only that warmth. I closed my eyes as my body and mind bathed in it. His arms were wrapped around me from behind, and his forehead was pressed to my back. I shuddered as his lips moved over my shoulders, up my neck, and to my ear.
“I’m so sorry.” He whispered, and I heard a crack in his voice. “Brynna, I’m so sorry. I love you so much. I’m sorry.”
“How many berries did you eat?” I asked him firmly.
“What?”
“How many berries did you eat?”
“That’s a random question, baby.” His voice still betrayed great pain and guilt.
“Answer it.”
“Three. Why?”
I turned to him and threw my arms around his neck. For the first time, I saw him cry. He made no noise when he did it, and I could feel how ashamed he was to be doing it, but he cried into my neck, sniffling and taking a silent breath once in a while. I could not imagine his guilt. I could not imagine his sadness. I had suffered pain at his hands. He loved me tremendously, passionately, and yet, while under the influence of that terrible fruit, he had harmed me. I knew that it had not been him.
“Promise me that it will never happen again.” I whispered.
“Never, baby. I promise. Brynna, I promise you.”
He kissed the bruises that were forming on my face. He kissed my shoulder where his teeth-marks were still only just visible. When he finally kissed my lips, I had tears in my eyes.
“I love you,” I told him in between his kisses, “I love you, James.”
“I know, baby. I love you, too.”
We were lying down on the floor of the bathroom. We were shedding our clothes already.
I do not care if you think that I was wrong for taking him back so easily. I knew his strong heart beat for me. I knew his love for me was pure. I knew that he was truly sorry. More than any of that, I knew that he would never harm me so cruelly again.
I needed James. For that, I am not sorry.
***

In regards to the murders, the story became clear. Both women were high on the Peace Fruit when the man, who was sober, had encountered them. They had fought him like the animals that they were, but he had won. Because he was clear-headed, he was able to utilize his new strength far more efficiently than they could in their state. He had killed them when they began to scream.
Penny told me her story in a tiny voice so unfitting of her normally boisterous personality. James and I sat beside her as Violet and Elijah paced outside in the hallway. Her honesty on the subject was astounding, but because she was so young, she did not know that she could have lied. James and I had agreed that we would only console her. We would not offer any halfhearted lectures on the immorality of killing another human being, which is what Don had told us to do before James had threatened to knock his teeth out. It was hilarious and infuriating, how easily Don’s creed was exposed for its hypocrisy. It was immoral for Penny to kill Donovan, when we supposedly lived in a society with no rules or morals. Instead of telling her what Don had said he wanted us to tell her, we stressed to her that what she had done was an act of self-defense. We promised her that we would never allow such a terrible thing to happen to her again.
Luckily, her mind had been clouded by her instincts during the act. The aftermath had been what had scared her. Tears leaked from her big, blue eyes as she told us about coming around to her senses and finding blood covering her body.
“I didn’t know what happened. But I think I really hurt him.”
I had not lied. I had just reiterated to her that she had been defending herself.
For several days, she was sullen, withdrawn from the simple work she did in the kitchen and from the people with whom she normally joked around and spoke to happily about anything and everything. Everyone understood, God or Gods bless them.
If I am remaining perfectly honest, I will tell you that I feared for James. I feared that his friends on security detail would ostracize him for what he had done. So many had witnessed the after-effects of his abuse, and as a result, the entire house knew the gory details. My fears were unnecessary, however; several men and women had suffered similar moments of frantic violence the day after their high. In fact, only a select few, myself included, had not.
Now, one would assume that after two women were slain and several people attacked their loved ones following their night of drugged frivolity, that the Peace Fruit would never be seen again in our house or consumed by the populace.
No. Not only did people continue to consume the berries one right after the other, they also began to drink whole bottles of the cheap liquor that had been scavenged from the ship on top of it. The parties were disgusting cesspools of sex, erotic violence, and screaming thanks to Don.
“Do you remember The Great Gatsby?” I asked James one night as I sat up in our bed, reading another one of Fitzgerald’s great works.
“Indeed, I do. Who doesn’t remember The Great Gatsby?”
“Many, I am sure,” I replied, “Do you remember how the parties thrown at Gatsby’s mansion were described? They were considered wild, which was so telling of the time period.”
“Well, that was the Roaring Twenties, at least according to my grandfather. That’s exactly how he described it.” James replied as he sketched my picture absentmindedly. I could not help but smile slightly as I watched him looking down over his glasses at the paper with his brows furrowed in concentration. I had not been aware until just a day or so earlier that he possessed such an affinity for drawing. While he had been in the woods, he had sketched several nature scenes that would make any art professor fall over himself in awe.
“For some reason, whenever I read that book, which was often, I always wanted to be there.”
“At one of Gatsby’s parties?”
“Indeed. I always wanted to experience the total abandon of living in that time when morals were shunned and people boozed themselves into demented delirium every night.”
He looked up at me, grinning widely. I turned my head on the side, raised my eyebrows and frowned jokingly.
“Plow ahead with your acerbic comment, my love. I can see that it is one you cannot suppress.”
He did not need me to tell him twice.
“You, Brynna Olivier, actually wanted to have fun?”
I kicked his leg lightly and he laughed to himself.
“That was not even clever, and yes, I did. The point of the story, Mr. Maxwell, is that I know now that I would rather die than engage in such folly. I know now that it is very dangerous for human beings to be given the freedom to embrace their dark side.”
“Maybe so. But I think Gatsby’s parties, though extravagant, did not involve people using drugs and smacking the shit out of each other or worse. His were just for fun, for celebration.”
“Well, they were also for show, which you and I both know is partly the motivation behind these parties thrown by Don. But those moronic children downstairs would have us believe that what they are doing is also for celebration.”
“But we know that’s not the case.” James assured me, “They’re doing that because for the first time in their lives, there is no one to tell them they can’t. In fact, they even have Don who is encouraging them. And I’m sure Adam is, as well.” His expression darkened upon mentioning his name. After we had resolved our issues, he had asked me where Adam had taken me and what was said. I had declined to answer.
“Will you ever tell me what happened?” James asked me quietly after putting his pencil down.
“No.” I answered through a yawn and a stretch.
“You’re sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“Would I be this calm if he had?”
“I suppose not.” James eyed me curiously, “I think you feel like you won something over him.”
“What?” My face contorted into a look of confusion, “Won what, dare I ask?”
“I don’t know, because you won’t tell me.”
“Should I be expecting belligerence now, James?” I turned my head on the side and raised my eyebrow again.
“Not belligerence. Just curiosity.”
“You know what they say about curiosity, don’t you? It kills felines.”
“Oh, well, luckily, I’m not a feline. In fact, if I’m anything, I’m a canine.”
“Yes,” I widened my eyes and nodded slowly, “You are.”
Our slight disagreement over my secrecy dissolved. We both laughed until he jumped up and came forward quickly to kiss me hard.
“I love you.” He told me softly.
“I love you.” I answered back sincerely before pressing my lips to his again. “Show me the picture.”
“No. It's terrible. It doesn't do you justice.”
“Stop. Let me see it.”
“Only if you fully understand that I am very tired, and that makes drawing difficult...”
“Stop acting like a shy, insecure little girl and show me the damn picture, James Maxwell.” I ordered him only half seriously.
“Oh my God! You're going to give me an eating disorder or a drinking problem if you keep talking to me like that, woman!” He exclaimed in mock rage as he sat up and grabbed the pad of paper from the end of our bed. “I didn't sign it, so it isn't worth anything.”
I chuckled to myself as I opened the pad to the page that he had drawn on. My mouth fell open slightly as I observed the drawing; every contour of my body and every detail of my face was spot-on. In the picture, my hand was rested lightly against the side of my face where I always placed it while I read. In the picture, I was so very beautiful, almost sensual in a way. My slender legs were curled up and crossed over at the ankle, and the book rested against my knees. My face was fixed into an expression of both curiosity and peace, as though the future events in the story I was reading were being guessed in my mind, but I was not tormenting myself over not knowing exactly what was to come.
“I'm not normally this sensitive about it. But what do you think?” James asked me softly. In my peripheral vision, I could see him studying me closely.
“I think you made me look very pretty.” I couldn't fight the smile that emerged when I turned my head to look at him.
He reached out and gently moved my long hair away from my face.
“You are pretty. You're beautiful, Brynna.”
My smile grew, and I kissed him. I closed my eyes as our lips moved together tenderly.
“Do you want to hear something rather odd?”
“Sure.”
“I don't think I would have been able to survive all of this if I didn't have you. If we hadn't met, I might have been able to pull through. But we did meet, and we got closer. If I hadn't found you in the woods...”
His lips were on mine again for a quick, warm kiss.
“You would have pulled through. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that you would have survived, Brynna. But either way, you did find me. I'm here. We're together.”
“I know. I suppose what I am trying to say is that I am thankful for you. I am thankful that I have you here with me. I am thankful that I have been able to get past whatever you want to call my issues and that I am able to admit that I love you. I don't know how I was able to feel so strongly for you so quickly, but I do.”
“I know you do, and believe me, I love you the same way. I'm baffled by it, too. I don't know how it's possible to feel this way about someone I only met a few months ago. At my age, you don't subscribe to the idea of love at first sight or even strong love at all, really. But something about you changed that in me. I know it's very real. It's very strong. Call me crazy, but I think it can last, Brynn.”
I smiled and nodded.
“So do I.”
We laid down side by side, grasping hands. I looked up at him, still smiling.
“It’s a free day tomorrow. What do you want to do?”
Don gave us all one day off from work a week.
“We can take Penny down to the lake. That will get her mind off of things.”
“It will.” I beamed, “She loves to swim down there. As long as you go in the water with her, because you know that I will not.”
“Yeah, I know. You and your fear of natural water. It was only a gargantuan water monster with huge teeth and strangling tentacles, Brynna. Seriously, you’ve got to move on.”
I laughed again.
“Yeah, well,” I shrugged, “We all have our little phobias, don’t we? Some people are afraid of spiders. Some people are afraid of prehistoric water beasts.”
“Some people are afraid of cucumbers. It happens, right?”
“It happens.” He was leaning towards me to kiss me again, and I closed the space between our mouths. When we laid down, I nestled my head against his chest and closed my eyes.
“Oh! We forgot to blow out the candles and turn the fire down!” I jumped up to go do both, silently chiding myself for forgetting such an important action. We could have burnt the house down with all of its idiotic party-goers inside. How very tragic that would have been…
“No. You stay here. It’s cold. I’ll do it.” He kissed my forehead as he stood up.
“You are sweet.”
“I try, but only for you, baby. I have to make up for when I’m a dog.”
I giggled and covered my mouth as I always did to stifle the sound. When he returned, I held up the animal fur blanket so he could crawl underneath of it. Our joint heat perfectly fought off the chill of the evening. Now that the fire was turned down, we had only the blanket and each other to keep warm.
“You’re not a dog, James.” I told him as I closed my eyes.
“No?”
“No way.”
After a few minutes of quiet, I spoke again.
“Do you think they will bury that man? Don said that they will, but I just cannot believe that someone would want to memorialize such a despicable person.”
“Well, unfortunately, Don is that someone. He's probably the only person on this planet who wants to have a funeral for that piece of shit. People are pissed about what he did. Out of all the people who died, four were suicides and two were murders. People are even more pissed about the fact that the murderer was sober when he did what he did. But yeah, as soon as he dies, we'll all be expected to turn out in droves to put him to rest. Maybe he'll even expect us to cry, which I'm sure is going to be quite difficult for you, despite your affinity for act...”
I sat up suddenly after my eyes jerked open. James sat up, too, his eyes white. He assumed that my sudden motion was the result of a foreboding feeling warning me of danger in the house.
“He's still alive?” I asked in a voice that was beginning to tremble.
“You didn't know that.” James realized before rubbing his eyes with both hands. “Oh, shit...”
“How is he alive? She inflicted great damage on him. He was bleeding out of his eyes when they carried him from the room. I assumed he would be dead in minutes, and you are telling me now that he has been alive for a day and a half?”
“No. I was lying,” He told me quickly, “I was mistaken.”
I blinked at him for several uncomfortable seconds.
“I was!” He insisted, “I must have heard it wrong.”
“You know what I'm going to say.” I growled at him with my eyes narrowed slightly.
“Yeah, and I will. I'm shutting up.” He laid back down and pulled me towards him. “Baby, even if he lives, he won't be able to do that again. He won't be physically able to hurt anyone again, least of all Penny. I'm sure he'll never go toe-to-toe with her again. Look what she did to him!”
“If he can find the strength in his mutilated body to harm her, he certainly will.” I whispered back as I laid my head on his chest. “He will most certainly want revenge for what she did to him. I cannot afford to take that chance.”
He turned sideways so that I was lying beside him and he could look into my eyes as he spoke.
“If he comes after Penny, we will deal with him together. Until then, just leave him alone. Don't do anything stupid, Brynn. Acting recklessly right now is stupid. You and I both know you're anything but that, don't we?”
I nodded and kissed him gently.
“Yes,” I replied convincingly, “You're right. For once.”
“I was bound to get a win on the board sometime, wasn't I?”
I smiled again.
“Yes. I suppose so. I will see you in the morning, my dear.”
Being overly intelligent made lying quite easy. I could correctly gauge which lies were believable and which were not. I could easily decide which details should be spoken and which would give away the ruse. Body language and eye contact were key to pulling off a lie, either big or small. As I smiled up at James, keeping my eyes locked on his, I knew that he believed me. Inside, my smile grew.
***

After he had fallen asleep, I carefully got up so as not to wake him. I crept out of our bedroom and closed the door behind me without a sound. My destination was set: In the basement, the doctors in our camp kept a makeshift office. They would have taken Donovan there.
The party was still in full swing, even as the second moon began its final descent towards the horizon. The bright beams cast from that white orb in the sky lit my way for me. It was not until I had silently opened the basement door that I was plunged into total darkness.
“Change over.” I whispered to myself, and at the command, my eyes were able to see. I walked easily down each steep stone step. Once I reached the landing, I moved through the corridor, my feet lightly touching the concrete floor and not making even the quietest patter.
Two doors down from the beginning of the corridor, and I would find my target, lying immobile on a bed made from logs and animal fur. His breaths would rasp in my ears as he struggled to say his piece. He would surely apologize and swear never to harm one hair on Penny's head. Perhaps he would even cry in repentance and beg for my forgiveness.
In response to all of those possible scenarios, I would simply pull the pillow from under his head and smother him. I would look up to the sky and smile as I felt his body struggling beneath me. When he moved no more, I would place the pillow back under his head and saunter away. His pleas for mercy and his tears of apology would have meant nothing. They would have only proved further that he was not a man.
Pulling my hoodie sleeve down over my hand, I turned the brass doorknob. The room was empty. The only light came from a tiny flame still burning inside of a lantern beside his bed. Sure enough, his breathing was labored and his wounds, in the state of repair that they were in, were beginning to crust over while still oozing repulsively. I walked closer to him to observe the plants that were cut up or minced completely and separated into piles on his nightstand. I knew one of them was called Elixir, and it was said to cure the most terrible of diseases and injuries. Several of our number had been afflicted with various cancers and found themselves cured upon ingesting that plant. In fact, they felt healthy again and ready to face their immortal lives with joy. If Donovan were to be given Elixir, his injuries would be healed completely. He would be strong once again.
As the thought grasped me, I pulled the pillow from under his head, thinking of Penny. As the fear assuaged, that rage I was becoming so comfortable with took its place. As I placed the pillow over his face, I wondered only briefly if I was truly capable of murdering a defenseless man.
The short answer: Yes, for I had to protect Penny. If Don would not punish the man for what he had done, I certainly would. I would enact the most final, resolute punishment imaginable: I would end his life.
Beside me, the lantern's flame flickered to full life. I was aware of someone standing in the room with me. I did not have to guess for very long because he spoke immediately; his voice was as unwelcome as a hard blow to my head.
“Well, good evening to you, you breathtaking silent assassin.”
I did not appreciate his pun. 
“What do you want?” I asked in a fury before whipping around to find Adam leaning against the door-frame with his huge arms crossed over his muscular chest. In his tight, black t-shirt and because of his slick, styled gray hair, he almost looked like an overage version of a ridiculous moron on that New Jersey-based “reality” show. However, I must admit, his physical attractiveness was not unnoticed by me. I ripped those thoughts about his physique and handsome face from my mind as though they were my own form of cancer. I glanced at the Elixir, wondering if it could rid me of such disgusting thoughts of Adam.
“I want you to think what you are doing through very carefully. I want you to be sure that you have fully prepared for the consequences of such a violent action.”
“I have. Thank you so much.” I replied curtly, and my fingers tightened around the soft plush pillow I still held in my hands. I raised it above my head and took a deep breath.
Donovan's thoughts screamed that he was sorry. He was not aware that I was standing there beside him, ready to end his life. He was not apologizing because he had suffered such extensive injuries. His cries of sorrow were genuine. His plea for his life was driven by his desire to “get better.” Perhaps, he wondered, there was a drug on the planet that could erase his sickest, most depraved urges.
Sickness. Was he sick?
“I want you to leave.” I told Adam quietly. “I told you to stay away. I was very clear in my orders. Yet here you are.”
“I was enjoying your leader's party when I saw you slink down the stairs. Curiosity got the better of me, I am afraid.” He replied as though I had asked for an explanation.
“If Penny had not been able to defend herself, he would have killed her.” I told Adam quickly. Our pattern of conversation was characterized by us both running on separate tracks, completely ignoring whatever the other said.
“If I don't kill him now, he will kill her. All of his internal cries for forgiveness do not erase the rage he feels in his heart for what she has done to him.”
“Are you quite certain of that?” Adam asked.
“Yes.”
“You are not.”
“You do not know what I am thinking. You also do not know what I can hear inside of him.”
I was not sure if he could hear Donovan's thoughts or not. I wondered if perhaps Adam was right, and I was lying. Maybe Donovan did not feel that strong urge to take revenge on my sister. Whatever the case, I refused to take the chance. I had to end his life. Though a part of me sympathized with him and wondered if maybe he could be saved from his violent lust, I could not risk his physical recovery. I could not see him walk around, healthy and whole once again, after the fear he had struck in Penny.
“There it is.” Adam whispered. I was startled to find that he was right behind me. “You cannot bear to see him live, for you wish to enact your own final form of justice. You wish to dispatch a man from this realm whom you feel does not deserve his life. You accuse me of playing God. How very hypocritical of you, Ms. Olivier.”
“Go away!” I shot at him furiously. I had raised my voice so that it thundered authoritatively around the room. I was sick of his calmness. I was sick of his constant analysis of me.
“You cannot do it while I am standing here. You know that you are wrong.”
“I am not wrong! I am doing this for Penny!”
“You are doing this to feel that you have taken action against a morally depraved man. You suffered great pain at another man's hands as a child. Now, you wish to kill poor Donovan because you were unable to kill your father. You think I do not know of your weaknesses, Brynna Olivier. But I know them all. You are doing this to assert power over men like them, for it is men like them who took your own power.”
I looked back at him, the flame from the lantern beside me crackling in my eyes.
“How are you able to read my mind? How do you know all of that, Adam?!”
“It is not your mind that I am reading; it is your face. Your eyes tell dark stories of your terrible past. I find it very...” His hands ran down my arms, and I shook him off furiously, “…intriguing.”
He was right only partially. A large portion of my decision to kill Donovan was motivated by my fear for Penny's safety. But the other part, the larger part, wanted to kill him for what he had done to those women. I wanted to avenge the violent deaths that could have been my own. I wanted to avenge the repulsive act to which those two women had been subjected, for I had suffered it myself.
“You are weak in that sense, my dear Brynna. Your fire both strengthens and cripples you. It is almost pathetic, in a way. It is certainly a fascinating paradox in my view, at least.”
Now, his barbs were flying. Whatever minimal pain I had inflicted on him with my cutting rejection and my bluntly honest assessment of his ways was driving his words. He wanted to punish me for my harshness towards him.
I found myself laughing. I covered my mouth lightly to suppress the snort that always seemed to follow such hilarity.
“I must have cut you so very deep, Adam. I am aware that you thought yourself unable to feel pain. I wondered that myself, actually. Now, I know that you feel. Not only do you feel, but it was me who was able to hurt you. Now, I know that I have power over you.” I smiled to myself, “For whatever reason, I am able to shatter your armor.”
He chuckled softly and squeezed my shoulders more tightly than perhaps he intended. His mouth pressed to my ear, and he whispered:
“Do not flatter yourself, my dear. I hold your life in my hands. I hold your secrets very close, even those that you do not know yet. I can shatter your armor just by making a fist. Do not forget that.”
As he drifted away from me, I looked down at the maimed man before me with fury boiling to frenzied life in my chest. I hated Adam. I hated Donovan. I hated Don. I hated those raucous, partying buffoons stomping and screaming above my head. I hated Dad. I hated Mom. I hated Maura. I hated Michael.
I brought the pillow down and held it over Donovan's face; I strengthened my grip as he thrashed wildly. He had found his strength somehow in the moment of his death, though by then, it was useless to him. It did not come close to matching my own. His hands flew up to claw at my arms as he attempted to weaken my grip. Even after his body went slack, and his chest deflated the air his lungs had been holding, I did not move.
“Your fire...” Adam said again from the doorway, “It lights your way, of course. But it also casts a great darkness.”
I merely looked down into the face of the man I had just killed as Adam finished his thought in a whisper:
“A shadow.”
His final two words rang in my ears long after he was gone.
***

“Did you hear that Donovan died last night in his sleep?” Rachel asked me the following morning.
“I did.” I stirred the pot of water boiling in front of me, showing no discernible emotion in response to that piece of news.
“They're saying he was just injured too severely.” Tony, another one of my friends said, “He went peacefully. Didn't deserve it, if you ask me. And I know if I ask you, you’ll say the same thing.”
“No. He did not.” 
I looked towards the end of the room where James was playing a game of cards with Frank, Quinn, Tony’s boyfriend, Tom, and the rest of security detail. They were not making another trip to the campsite that day and the little farm work they had volunteered to do had already been finished. We were chopping, mincing, stewing and baking the fruits of their labor.
James's eyes met mine several times throughout the morning. In them, I saw a recognition, a suspicion that would be voiced at the earliest convenience. That night, I was sure he would question me about Donovan's death.
I could not understand how most people found it so difficult to act coolly and rationally after taking a life. My face did not betray the slightest indication of what I had done. I did not jump nervously or flinch upon hearing the news of Donovan's death. I simply acted as I always did. I simply emptied my mind of what I had done.
Above all else, I felt no guilt. Because of that alone, I should have worried. I should have acknowledged then that Adam's assessment of me was correct. I should have begun trying to morph my frigid heart into whatever it had been before. But then, it had always been so cold.
“So, did you do it, Brynna?” James asked me that night.
I screwed up my face in mild confusion and continued to brush out my wet hair.
“Did I do what, James?” I asked calmly with a high note of curiosity in my voice that was only just convincing enough.
“Did you kill him?”
“Who? Donovan?”
“Yes.”
“No, but I wish he had. He died in his sleep.” I replied easily, “You know that if I were to kill him for what he did to Penny, there would be nothing left of him.”
“Are you lying to me?”
“That is rude, James.”
“Maybe so. But are you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“God or Gods, yes!” I exclaimed in frustration, “How can you even ask me this? How can you even suspect me of doing something like that?”
“Because Donovan was a disgusting excuse for a human being, and he wronged you when he went after Penny. That's how.”
“I was here with you all last night. I was asleep. Nature just took its course with him. What I find so very odd is that we cannot accept that. We are so used to strange and unsavory circumstances that we cannot accept that a man met his death in his sleep.”
James sat down beside me and grasped both of my hands.
“I know you weren't here with me last night. You were gone for an hour.”
My heart plummeted, but I did not show even a hint of that new discomfort on my face.
“So, let me ask you again: Did you kill him?”
I stared at him for a long while. After several minutes had passed, I shrugged in apathy. I was not sorry.
He nodded and broke his hold on my hands.
“That's what I thought.” He muttered as he laid down in bed beside me.
“So, what now?” I looked over at him and awaited an answer.
“Now, we can only hope that they don't find out. Otherwise, we're out on our asses. We're going to be feeling around in the forest, looking for a place to live where they can't get at us. You didn't think this through at all, did you?”
“I did. More than you could know.”
I crawled up behind him and wrapped my arms around his middle. I kissed his shoulder and laid my head down.
“Everything will be fine. I covered all the bases, as they say. Given their lack of a forensic investigator, they will never know that I was there. Even if we had an entire crime scene investigative team, they would find nothing. Alright?”
My hands were rested on his chest. His came up to grasp them.
“You're sure?”
“Positive.”
“Alright, then.”
“You're alright with this?”
After he had turned over to look at me, I saw a steely ice hanging about in his normally warm brown eyes.
“If it had been you, I would have destroyed him. There would have been nothing left of him.”
I smiled slightly and climbed on top of him. My hair was hanging in my face, and he moved it away as I leaned down to kiss his lips gently.
“I know.”
Nothing more came of Donovan's death.
***

We passed our free time in the ways that most living in normal circumstances would. Our housemates became more like friendly neighbors; we spent an abundance of time with them, getting to know their families and their back stories. Every person had an interesting story to tell, I found.
Penny made friends easily, as she always had. It took time but eventually, I was able to leave her in the care of others. However, despite my fragile trust in the people around me strengthening every day, I would not leave Penny alone with males, even those who had children. James assured me gently that the chances of the unthinkable happening to Penny were slim but still, I could not risk it.
Violet saw Nick more often than I was truly comfortable with. Though the young man was quite gentlemanly towards her and me, I could not help but suspect that their relationship was physical. James, once again, assured me that I was mistaken. His theory was that I was still guilt-ridden over breaking my long-held principles regarding men with him. As a result, I believed subconsciously that Violet was making a mistake that I had long taught her never to make.
I thanked him for his astute psychological analysis once again, knowing that he was wrong about his theory, at least somewhat.
I had absolutely no regrets when it came to James. My feelings for him had long since surpassed my need to pull away. To put it bluntly, I was hopelessly, desperately in love with him. How could I not have been? We had survived the end together. When the burden of our new lives began to wear one or both of us down, we pulled together and carried the weight. As a child, when I had pictured relationships, I had always just seen the sexual aspect. As you can imagine, I was thoroughly disgusted by such stunted, out of place images of two people allowing such intimate closeness, both physical and emotional, to one another. But I understood suddenly that when one was in love, one was able to achieve that closeness without any shame or fear. After so many years of shuddering in discomfort every time I pictured having a physical tryst with a man, I believed in the normalcy and true romance of the act.
We bonded over the most trivial things. We laughed so often that outsiders and passerby more than likely believed us to be consistently high on the Peace Fruit. I had not laughed with such frequency in so many years. The muscles in my face protested the constant assault of smiles and giggles at first but then, they adjusted to the lighthearted nature of mine and James' time together. My heart followed a similar path: I was beginning to drop my need to disdainfully tear down others as I wallowed in the misery and woe of the world. I was beginning to see things through a lens of beauty and idealism, however foolishly. James aided me in accepting that new outlook just as he came to grip it firmly himself.
In short, I felt so blissfully alive, for perhaps the first time in my life.
“What about this one?” I asked him one night. I was pressing one finger lightly against the tattoo over his heart. “That's very...”
“I know.” He sighed heavily and shook his head in overly dramatic shame. “I like to say it's simple.”
I laughed and swooped my hair back so that I could observe the tattoo more closely. I was perched on his middle, straddling him and adjusting my glasses so I could see the details of his embarrassingly ridiculous tattoo.
“That is a nice way of saying, 'It is very old and poorly designed.'”
“Excuse me, madam, I designed this tattoo myself.”
“Oh my God...” I covered my mouth to hide my slightly chagrined smile. “Are you serious?”
His face broke into a grin, and he chuckled softly.
“No. Of course not. I walked into the shop, flipped through one of the books for five minutes, and chose this one.”
“So, you must have been young, then?” I asked, “Like eighteen?”
“Forty-one, actually.”
The boisterous giggles that took hold of me almost erased the look of consternation that he was trying so valiantly to keep plastered on his face. As I covered my mouth and struggled to stay upright, his hands grasped my hips, holding me firmly so I did not fall off of him.
“This right here,” He touched the tattoo, “…is most certainly not a laughing matter. This is a cautionary tale to warn young people like you against drinking heavily with your friends and wandering into a tattoo shop at midnight. Seriously, that story is like the new-age Hansel and Gretel. You should be terrified right now.”
“Stop!” I exclaimed, grasping my stomach as I only laughed harder. “You are right, though! It is the worst tattoo I have ever had the displeasure of viewing!”
“I don't need to translate that into regular people-speak, but I might anyway.” 
The tattoo in question was a tawny owl wearing dark-rimmed glasses. The location was curious, considering that a design placed over one's heart would generally denote some overly emotional sentiment. If James had tattooed one of his many girlfriend's names there, though that surely would have been very stupid, I might have understood. But a brash caricature of an animal seemed out of place over his heart that I knew to be so very large.
“I was looking at it earlier when we were...” I trailed off, spinning my hand by my head as though that somehow signified “having sex.” James mimicked the awkward hand gesture, and then we were both laughing again.
“You were looking at it? While we were doing that? Am I off my game today, or something?”
“Just because I was looking at it doesn't mean that I was not paying attention to what you and I were doing. It just caught my eye, and I found myself unable to tear my gaze away.”
“And you thought, 'My boyfriend has the greatest taste in ink...'”
“No. I thought, 'That is a strange place for a tattoo whose existence was clearly born from whimsy.'”
“You like that one. ‘Born from whimsy...'”
“I do, indeed.”
“What do you think I should have gotten there? My wife's name, or something?”
“That would be both obscene and doltish, so no.” I replied, shaking my head rapidly. My choice of words seemed to amuse him because he was chuckling softly once again.
“This is no laughing matter, James Maxwell.” I said in jocular scorn, “Are you unaware of the fact that it has been proven to end relationships when one of the people in said romantic binding tattoo the name of their partner on their person?”
“Don't get me wrong, I love the alliteration, but do you want to cite your source on that? Because I think you're wrong. I'm sure there are other reasons that the relationship ends.”
“Ha-ha, I know you are being blithely sarcastic. I'm sure there are other reasons as well. But there is a causal relationship between the two events, at least in my humble opinion.”
“Your humble opinion? I don't think I need to tell you that what you just said is an oxymoron.”
We were laughing again.
“Alright, lady, you want me to explain every drunken night I spent in tattoo parlors. I want to know about yours.”
“I only have three tattoos and believe me, the stories are not that interesting. Plus, I was stone-cold sober when I got each and every one of them, so the stories you have requested regarding drunken nights would simply not be truthful.”
“I never asked for stories regarding,” He stopped, “…whatever it was that you just said.”
I grinned in over-the-top triumph.
“Yeah? That face? 'Ha-ha, I got you?'” He asked before sitting up quickly and pressing his lips to mine hard. “I'm treading very close to a dangerously personal topic, aren't I?”
“What makes you say that?” I asked calmly, though internally, my insides were beginning to swell in anxiety. He was right; the stories behind each of my tattoos were very personal.
“Because you're starting to get that sketchy look in your eyes like I am treading very close to a dangerously personal topic. Either that, or you're about to go on a killing rampage.”
“Oh, look at you. You know me so well.” I made an effort to smile at him and shrug, “At another time, my dear, I will tell you all about them. Just not tonight. Besides, my ink does not rival that lovely bespectacled avian creature that is cemented so glaringly on your chest.” I walked my fingers over it, smiling in genuine amusement once again.
“That one on your back certainly rivals it. You know how that one drives me crazy. I love it.”
“Despite how colossal it is?”
“It is the perfect size, actually. Sometimes, when you bend over, I can see it when your shirt comes up. You did it the other day, and I kid you not, every male on Security Detail was staring.”
“People were gawking at me, and you didn't say anything?” I feigned shock and offense.
“Nope. I just grinned and nodded. I got several fist bumps. I'm a little bit of a celebrity amongst those guys, I have to say. They think you are very attractive and that I'm old. Because those two things don't generally go together unless there is a large sum of money involved, they believe that I must be some God-like creation who reeled you in with my charm and boyish good looks,” He shrugged nonchalantly, “And my massive lower appendage.”
I laughed so raucously that I nearly rolled off of him again. His hands found my waist, and he held me up.
“I find it really insulting that you're laughing like that. Just so you know...”
I kissed him quickly.
“I love you dearly, James Maxwell,” I gasped out, “You never fail to entertain me.”
“I love you passionately, Brynna Olivier. Even when you're about to suffer a concussion after your laughter sends you flying sideways off of me and onto the floor...”
“Stop!” I covered my mouth as I snorted, “I really might fall off of you!”
“It would be kind of funny. You have to admit.”
“If I were to suffer a concussion, you would find it humorous?! You don't love me at all, James Maxwell!” I accused him teasingly.
“Oh, I don't?”
“No. I know the truth now.”
“You think that's the truth?”
“I do, or else I wouldn't have said that now, would I?”
He sat up quickly and pulled me forward, crushing my mouth against his. My hands traveled over the curves of his back, exploring the rocky terrain in innocently greedy fascination. My breathing hitched in my throat as his tongue confidently moved against my own.
When he pulled away, he rested his hand on my cheek. I placed my own over top of his and noted as I looked into his eyes that he was suddenly completely serious.
“I love every last thing about you, Brynna.”
My heart jumped in surprise before falling over itself in a swoon of powerful affection for him. When I finally regained my ability to speak, I found that my throat had clenched in the urge to cry at such simple yet so emotionally resounding words.
“I never thought I would hear that from someone in a thousand years. Surely, you are mistaken.”
“Surely, I'm not, actually. Luckily for you and me, we do have a thousand years. We probably have two, three, maybe even four thousand years.”
“A part of me doubts seriously that you will last through that much time with me. Eventually, my tendencies will drive you away.”
“Really?” He raised his eyebrows at me in an acknowledgment of some challenge that I did not realize I had proposed.
I nodded, trying to smile again but feeling those unwelcome tears that so painfully hindered my ability to breathe reemerge quickly. He saw them and reached out to gently wipe them away. I turned my head away from him, trying to hide the sadness that he had inadvertently provoked in me. There was nothing else in the world that I wanted more than to be with him forever as he suggested we would be. But I knew myself. I knew him quite well, also. I knew that somewhere, deeply guarded inside of him, was a breaking point. After much prodding, eventually that forceful reluctance and drive to get away from an emotional tormentor would detonate. In my own way, I tormented him. My need to detach drove my cruelty to spur back to life and as a result, he was driven away.
“Stop.” He whispered after resting his forehead against mine. I closed my eyes and drank in his deliciously soothing scent. “I might not be able to read your thoughts, but I can read your face very easily.”
“Really?” I asked softly as I stroked his stubble-covered cheek with my thumb. “I thought I hid these moments well. Now you're telling me that I do not.”
“I can see them now. You don't think that I know, but I can tell when you're upset. I can generally guess what it is that's upsetting you. Right now, you think you're going to drive me away.”
I was shocked that he had guessed accurately the true nature of my distress.
“Brynna,” His hands grasped mine, “Look at me.”
I did.
“I told you that I love you and that I think we can last, and believe me, I mean that. A part of me knows that the same way you just know things most of the time. But just in case I'm wrong and that feeling is bullshit, I'm going to say that we should just play this by ear. I know you sit and worry about the future and what it holds for you, for me, for us, for Violet, for Penny... constantly. But how about if we just take this one step at a time?”
“I suppose that would alleviate some of my anxiety. But you do know that it will take some time for me to condition myself to think that way. So, once again, I must ask for your patience, which I am sure just thrills you.”
“It does thrill me. Do you know why?”
“I know that this is very shocking but no, I do not know why.”
“It thrills me because in a roundabout way, you just admitted I'm right. And that's another one on the scoreboard for me finally, so thank you for that, my dear.”
The tension in the room between us broke. I found myself laughing again as I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his torso. As I gazed into his deep, soulful eyes, I contemplated his words. In that long moment of silence, I realized that his wisdom rivaled mine and that he was right. On my end, I had to begin trusting him completely. I had to let go of my fear and doubt regarding our love for one another. Most importantly, I had to start living in the moment. After all that we had overcome, I deserved that. Instead of tormenting myself over what the future might have held, I needed to strive for total happiness and inner harmony in the present. I had studied eastern religions extensively and such practices were stressed as guidelines for a life that was truly worth living. I smiled as I remembered pouring over those books, drinking in the customs that would enable such free and peaceful thinking.
“What?” James asked me softly as his hands gently moved my hair away from my face.
I shook my head and shrugged.
“You are right. You might jest about it, but you're right. You are much smarter than that ridiculous tattoo on your chest would lead me to believe.”
He laughed with me and kissed my lips tenderly. After that, he laid down, still holding me to him. I slid off of him and propped my head up on my hand so I could look into his eyes. I was so very enamored by their light shade and how I truly could see every bit of the goodness in his soul when I looked at him. In every minimal etching of age in his face, I saw his goodness. You cannot imagine the peace that brought me.
I fell asleep listening to the consistent serenade of his strongly beating heart with a smile on my face. As I drifted off, my contact with his skin enabled me to hear clearly one key thought that passed through his mind just before he fell asleep, as well:
“I saw her and everything changed. Everything.”
No words, either written or spoken, had ever made my heart erupt into beats of such wild intensity. I picked my head up, stroked his handsome face again, and caressed his lips with mine. Knowing that he was asleep, I offered a confession of my own.
“I know now that I can’t live without you.”
No words, either written or spoken, had ever terrified me so painfully while bringing me so much insensible joy and comfort. Tears rushed into my eyes as I studied his relaxed features and listened to his soft breathing. I did not shed them, but they came in pure joy at the sight of him, this man I adored so deeply and needed so desperately.
“I love you so much, James.”
After I laid my head down against his chest again, his hand came up to rub my back. From the barrier between sleep and consciousness, he whispered:
“I love you, too, baby.”
I fell asleep smiling.
***

I was walking back to my room alone a few nights later, thinking about Maura. I was stunned to find her face at the forefront of my mind. I was baffled as to how my heart could possibly be hurting for her.
Quite surprisingly, I hoped that she was well.
As soon as my sympathy bubbled up, it quickly died off, as though someone had turned down the flame beneath the steaming pot of my thoughts. Now, her face merely simmered beneath the surface of the water; in a few short minutes, it had slowly faded away in the rising steam.
“You’re beautiful.” A voice said behind me.
I whipped around, startled by the presence of a man I knew only by face.
“You are frightening.” I replied sarcastically. With that verbal barb at him thrown, I turned around to keep walking.
“Are you up for sharing?”
“Excuse me?” I looked back at him again.
“Sharing.”
“You repeating the word does not disclose its definition. I am aware that somehow, the meaning has changed, given the vague contextual clues of our conversation.”
He laughed flippantly as he strode forward to walk by my side.
“You’re weird.”
“Why do you keep attributing random traits to me when you scarcely know who I am? In fact, why are you following me?”
“I just really want to know if you’re up for sharing.”
“What does that mean?” I threw my hands up in frustration.
“Everyone is doing it.”
“You have a difficult time answering simple questions. I am sure grade school was quite challenging for you.”
“Everyone says you’re a firecracker. I’ve never talked to you before…”
“And thank God or the Gods for that.”
“…but now I see it.”
“I am going into my room now.”
“Can I join you?”
“No.” I narrowed my eyes and shook my head as I whispered the simple word. I was befuddled as to what that strange man could possibly want. But slowly, it began to dawn on me: He was looking to, as the kids say, “hook up.”
“Oh, my,” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Not only am I completely uninterested in having intercourse with a man of your empty-headed nature, but I am also in a relationship.”
“Everyone who is sharing is with someone. That’s why they call it ‘sharing.’”
The context finally became clear to me. I grimaced in disgust.
“People in relationships are sharing their partners. Is that at what you are hinting right now? Clearly, if you would not say it outright, you must have been aware that I would not agree to engage in such lewd behavior.”
“No. I just wanted to see if you’re as sharp as they say.”
“Well, I can assure you that I am. Carry on now.”
I slid the old key into the lock on my door. When I opened it and strode inside, he followed me in.
“Your boyfriend’s not here. I’ll bet you anything he won’t mind. He gets what we’re doing here. He gets how we live.”
“That sentence made absolutely no sense, and if you do not take two steps back so that I can slam the door in your face, I will gladly kick you so hard in the testicles that even the most gifted doctor left on this planet will be unable to retrieve them from inside of your body!”
“Come on. It will be fun! You need to let loose, girl! Seriously, with what we’re doing here, how we’re living, you can’t think that no one is going to make passes at you. I also know that you won’t be able to resist for very long.” He grinned at me.
“I won’t be able to resist you, specifically, or the notion of free love?’
“Both.”
I sighed heavily and let my eyes change over.
“I hope you were not planning on producing children…”
“You’ve been with that old guy. You need to be with someone like me. Let me show you how it’s done! When it's over, you won't even want him anymore.”
So many things could have been said in response to that. So many pins could have pierced the thick skin of his ego. I could have told him that James, though he was older, knew things about women and sexual pleasure that would baffle him into a drooling fit of confusion and shame at his own lack of knowledge. I could have said that even if he and I were the only two people left out of our group, I still would not have sex with him. I could have said that James and I were strongly bonded and interested in no other people. In my case, I was especially not interested in horny little boys like him.
Words just would not satisfy my irritation, for once. So, I brought back my foot and kicked him with all the force I could summon right between his legs. The excruciating pain snatched the breath from his lungs. He fell to his knees with both hands clutching his wounded lower appendage. I should have felt slightly guilty for inflicting such agony. Instead I pushed him hard so that he fell backwards out of my room. I kicked both of his feet until his whole body was in the hallway. Then, I slammed the door shut and listened for a moment to him moaning in pain.
“Gross…” I whispered.
James came in a few minutes later, looking back over his shoulder in slightly amused confusion at the boy who was still lying on the floor.
“He made a pass at you?”
I nodded, my face displaying my disgust and annoyance.
“Kicked him in the balls?”
“Yes.”
James looked back at him as he writhed on the floor in pain still.
“Was he vulgar?”
“Very.”
“Good on ya.”
He closed the door.
***

“It’s a bad day to be in this camp.” Rachel told me sullenly one morning as she and I and Tony listened to the shouting match being waged in the hallway. Don had raised the donated rations quantity yet again. To that date, he had raised it three times. First, it was every person contributing a handful of their crops. Then, it was half. Now, he had raised the quantity to sixty-five percent.
“Do you know what I heard?” Rachel asked me.
“No, I do not know. What did you hear?”
“I heard that Jimmy and Gary’s room got ransacked. Everything was torn up and thrown all around. Their watches and stuff were missing.”
“Someone wrecked their room to steal their watches?” Tony asked, and I smacked his hand because he was continually eating pieces of the carrots I had been chopping for fifteen minutes. “Ow! What is the use of a watch here, exactly?”
“Does it matter? Plus, it wasn’t just their watches that got stolen. Whoever did it took some of their crops, too. They were keeping a lot of corn and orange cabbage up there to eat. I heard even a few bottles of water were taken out of the icebox.”
“How very rude! I have heard similar tales of woe.”
Many of our acquaintances in the kitchen had been victims of thievery. One girl a few years older than me told me that her sister’s diamond earrings had been stolen. A man told me that someone had stolen his wife’s wedding ring. I had been silently hoping that the cowardly thief was just one man or woman with a pitiful case of kleptomania. I knew better, however. I knew that not only was there more than one thief but that they were working alone. Somehow, multiple thieves stealing for just themselves was more frightening than a band of thieves working in a group.
Human morality was slowly slipping away. People were embracing the lawlessness that would certainly coincide with Don's way of life.
“Has Don been looking for whomever they are?” I asked.
“No. You know Don.” Rachel said with a roll of her eyes, “Don says that it’s unfortunate but he won’t be doing anything to stop it. We all just have to start locking our doors. You think you can trust people…”
“I do not ever think that I can trust people. I know that people are allowing their dark sides to get the better of them. They are allowing apathy and selfishness to rule their lives. Don encourages that, doesn’t he? Look at how he pushes the Peace Fruit at everyone.”
“I know.”
“And now he wants to raise the tax.” Tony added, “God, we already get peanuts, don’t we, and now we’ve got to pay even more to him. And why? So he can pony is up to Adam and keep us in his good graces.”
“Ugh. Adam.” I groaned, and they made similar noises of assent. 
After a long moment, Rachel said, “He is really hot, though.”
“Rachel!” Tony and I said simultaneously. 
“You’re going to starve us, Don!” I heard Elijah shout in the hallway.
“That’s what he wants, Eli! I don’t even know why you’re surprised!” Frank yelled in response.
“Why would I want to starve anyone? I’m not…” Don stopped, afraid of treading too close to a personal insult with my rapidly growing brother. Elijah was beginning to show signs of the same evolution that had taken hold of James.
“What? You’re not my father? Well, believe me, you’re dancing pretty close to that line, Don! These people farm all day. They work their asses off in the hot sun all day long so they can feed themselves! You can’t tell them how much they should be giving you!”
“I absolutely can, or we will starve! Don’t you see?! I am taking enough food so that we can all eat. I am taking enough to be cooked and served to everyone. How you can believe that I should be encouraging selfishness at a time like this is beyond me, Elijah! You are so young! You are the product of your affluent upbringing, I'm telling you!”
“This has nothing to do with being young or growing up with money, Don! This has to do with right and wrong! You’re stealing what people are growing themselves. That was never part of the deal!”“What was the deal? Tell me what the deal was, and I’ll do my best to make it happen!” Don replied sarcastically. “I am doing the best I can with what we have!’
“You’re giving most of it over to him!”
“Him who?!” Don demanded, and I watched him throw his hands up in frustration as he spoke.
“Adam!” Frank and Elijah shouted simultaneously and in the same tone of impassioned accusation.
“Adam gets next to nothing from us.” Don lied quickly. I could tell that he was being less than truthful by the way he stammered and rolled his eyes multiple times. For a moment, he looked as though he might be succumbing to some sort of fit. Given how much of the Peace Fruit he consumed an evening, I would not be surprised if he suffered some form of neurological shutdown.
“We’re at the breaking point. Things were fine for a few weeks, but he’s screwing us now, guys.” Rachel told me softly as she skinned a large rabbit behind me. I grimaced at the sight and turned back to the vegetables and herbs that I was responsible for.
I nodded in response to what she had said as I picked up a handful of strongly-scented herbs that I had chopped and threw them into the steaming water on the stove.
“He expects us to believe his lies. He expects us not to question him. That is just plain irresponsibility, and I will have no parts of it.” I told her solemnly.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead on the back of my hand and glanced over at Penny. She and two of her friends were filling water bottles and glancing in apprehension towards the door. When Penny's fearful eyes met mine, I smiled, rolled my eyes, and shook my head in an attempt to pretend like the argument outside was just an instance of three boys being utterly silly. A look of relief came over her face, and I watched as she told her friends that everything was alright.
“Why do you think he’s giving Adam most of the crops?” Rachel asked. “Do you really think it’s just to keep us in his good graces? Does Adam really need crops?”
“Of course he doesn’t, and yes, I do think that Don is trying to appease him. But I know, from listening in on his thoughts, that Don believes Adam is also aiding the Bachums, though I am almost sure that is not true. Adam has some sort of stake in this war. There is something very crucial in it for him. I have not yet deciphered exactly what that something is.”
“I can’t believe that Adam would just take our food like that. You’re right, Rache: He’s not wanting for shit up there in his city. Lord knows he probably has plenty to eat. He’s their leader. I’m sure he’s eating well.” Tony replied in disgust.
“Yes. I am sure of that, as well. But I absolutely can believe that he would take from us. He will take whatever he wants just to take, I’m afraid.”
We stopped talking for a few minutes to focus on our mindless jobs while also trying to drown out our opinions on the matter.
“Are you and James okay?” Rachel asked me. Her question moved a little too close to personal territory in a way with which I was not comfortable entirely. But instead of snapping at her about her business versus business that was mine, I sighed heavily, and reminded myself that we were basically friends.
“We are doing well. I forgive him for what he did.”
“That’s pretty big of you, considering exactly what he did.”
“Well, he was high. He has not taken the Peace Fruit since. I cannot believe so many others are still recklessly endangering themselves and everyone else in this house by doing so.”
“It’s what everyone wants though, isn’t it?” Tony replied bitterly, “They don’t want to think. That’s why so many people aren’t calling Don on his bullshit. They just want to keep their mouths shut and tow the line.”
“That kind of thinking led to the mess we were in on Earth. The political mess, I mean. The governmental mess…”
“I guess you’re right.”
“I am right.”
“Of course you are.” Tony chuckled before turning to another serious, personal topic, “What about Penny? How is she?”
I looked over at her again and Rachel and Tony joined me in the glance. The water bottles were full and standing in neat lines on the sink. Penny and her friends had moved on to separating vegetables both known and exotic. Nick was there with her, talking to her quietly while stealing a little of everything. Penny beamed when he ate what he had taken in grand gestures. A few times, she even laughed out loud. I could not help but smile to myself.
“She is coming around. It has been a few weeks. She still feels badly about it, but we are working to resolve her guilt. It is a struggle, but she will endure.”
“I don’t doubt that.” Tony said, and he grinned at me, which caused me to grin in response before he had even finished what he was going to say. “Not when she’s got her tough-as-nails mama to look out for her.”
My grin widened at the compliment; it was so very fitting.
“I do my best. James and I have both picked up the slack that was never carried by my parents. Finally, she has a respectable father figure.”
“He is respectable. He loves her a lot. Everybody says that. Everybody says that he loves you a lot, too. Tom says that he talks about you constantly. Well, almost constantly. It’s not like, creepy constantly.”
“I know he does. I am sure our relationship is still very shocking to everyone…”
“Not at all.” Rachel chimed in, “People get it. He’s good to you. Everybody sees that. Except for what happened with the Peace Fruit but then, so many others went through the same side effects. He’s a good man, Brynna.” She pointed at me with the knife, and my eyes widened. Tony cracked up. “Don’t let him go.”
How very sentimental and yet, how very true as well. The smile on my face widened at the thought of him. When they were not running back and forth to the campsite, the security detail worked out in the fields with the gardeners, harvesting the land for our sustenance. I pictured him out there with his shirt tied around his head, sweating as he plowed the fertile earth. I pictured him laughing along with the jokes and banter that the gardeners tended to use as their conversation. A swelling of love for him spread throughout my chest, caressing my insides and warming me straight down to my soul.
“I am glad that you said that.” I told Rachel through my small smile.
“Why is that?”
“Because though I might not ever have doubted this, I suddenly acknowledged openly to myself how lucky I am to have him. He loves me. He loves Penny and Violet. He even loves Elijah, to a certain degree.”
“Well, I hate to rain on your parade, and dampen your mood, and all that stuff,” Tony said, “But that feeling is definitely not reciprocated.”
“It is not.” I replied with a slight smile, “But in time, Eli will see why I love him so much. When I would come in contact with men I thought to be upstanding in all ways, I always described them as good, honest, and decent. James fits all three of those traits quite nicely.”
“He does. Plus, he has a rocking body and a hot face.” Rachel added.
“Rachel! One would never know that you are happily married!”
“What?! I notice when other guys are attractive, and Joe notices when other girls are attractive. We have a hands, mouths, and lower anatomies to ourselves and each other rule.” 
“I like that rule. Can Tom and I have that rule? Cuz that Pangaean guy that comes here and talks to the Ares? Holy shit. I call him Black Beauty.”
“And he’s gay, too!” I said excitedly, “Well, he’s both. But still!”
“Oh, Jesus take the wheel…” He murmured, and Rachel and I laughed hysterically. “I’m just kidding. I will deny saying all of that if you tell Tom I said it. What we talk about stays between us girls.”
We laughed even harder, because Tony was so tough and buff and grizzly bear-like that to hear him refer to himself as a girl was just too hilarious. 
“But seriously, Brynn, Rachel’s observations are astute. James is the total package. Consider yourself lucky, and believe me when I say, most women here are jealous that you have him. I don’t look it, but I’m gay, and I love gossip.”
“Oh, Tony, we know. You’re our source!” Rachel told him.
“Exactly. To continue being the source, I have to listen in on what people say, and there are ladies here—married, single, old, young—who are jealous of what you and James have.”
“That gives me very little pleasure, surprisingly enough.” I said, “I do not care about the envy of other women.” I thought to myself for a moment before clarifying a nagging point, “But if any of them try to take him from me, they are going to suffer the full wrath of my evolution, I can tell you that.”
Rachel, Tony, and I both laughed half-hysterically.
“Yeah, girl!” Rachel said, “That’s your man!”
“Damn right, he is.”
“We’ll help you kill the bitch who tries to take him from you.” Tony said.
“Damn right, we will.” Rachel agreed.
We laughed again, ignoring the ongoing argument out in the hallway. I did not care to listen. I just wanted to muse briefly on how everything had remained level despite all that had lead me to believe that chaos was inevitable. I looked around, feeling great affection for my coworkers in the kitchen. I liked mostly everyone in the house. I enjoyed socializing with them, which as I am sure you have gathered, was quite an odd turn for me.
I had help, finally, in taking care of Penny. I did not have to shoulder the responsibilities completely on my own. She had a paternal figure who was both strong and caring. Violet had somebody else to bother with her requests for permission to do teenage things. Sure, Elijah had someone to hate, but I did not view him through the eyes of maternity with which I viewed my sisters. I could not have cared less what he thought of James.
I loved that man dearly. I would hold him close to me for all the immortal years I spent on Pangaea. We would strengthen our deep bond with every moment we spent together. Maybe, I thought quietly to myself with uncertainty, we would even have children of our own.
No, maybe not.
Outside the window, thunder rumbled and a streak of lightning slashed a jagged line of light through the dark gray clouds.
How very, very cliché, my mind drawled sarcastically.
No, I thought forcefully in response, It's nothing. Superstition is for the young and stupid.
Yet I could not help but believe that something ominous was on the horizon. The world would soon erupt into madness and no one, not even me with all of the things I knew, would be able to stop it.

Quinn

I had been reluctant to believe that everything was going to turn up, but after several months living in Don’s house, I couldn’t help but embrace a little optimism. There were many people to talk to, and the work definitely wasn’t difficult. We never ran into any threatening forces on our trips to the campsite, and we were foraging more than we needed.
After the first night when Alice and I took the Peace Fruit, we had witnessed the horrible after-effects. James had attacked Brynna. He hadn’t just used his fists; he had tried to do the absolute worst. Alice was devastated; she sympathized greatly with the girl who was barely our friend. I couldn’t help but feel badly for her, too. But we didn’t judge James. We both just silently thanked our lucky stars that we hadn’t suffered a similar episode of violence.
After that, though, everything shaped up. People continued to party every night but those who didn't want to take their chances again with the Fruit hung out together. Believe me when I say that those lazy evenings playing cards, listening to music, and talking about our lives on both Earth and Pangaea were welcome moments of peace far more powerful than anything that could be achieved by the two-faced Peace fruit.
It wasn’t the log cabin that I had promised Alice, but it was a consistent lifestyle. It was the most normal life we could have had on Pangaea. I went off to “work” every morning and came home to her every night. She worked in the kitchen with Brynna, Violet, and Penny all day. Since coming to Pangaea, we were living more like married people than we ever would have at our age on Earth. It was good practice for the real thing.
“So, what do you think, man?” Angie, one of only five women on our team, asked one day as we walked, “Who is going to be the first to get married? Brynna and James, or Quinn and Alice?”
“Don’t say that word to Brynn. She’ll flip.” I told her with a laugh. James and Brynna were inseparable, but I knew that getting married was not at the top of their priorities list, at least not yet. She would be especially adamant about avoiding marriage, given her staunch opposition to the institution as a whole.
“Yeah, and we’re not at that point yet.” James agreed, “Maybe in a couple of years.”
“You two love each other, don’t you?” Angie pressed him.
“Of course we do.” James said surely. “But this is the twenty-first century. Well, who knows what century it is here? But from where we came from, it was the twenty-first, and marriage was on its way out anyway.”
“I heard that over in Mary and Rich Bachum’s camp, you have to be married to someone.” Bennie, an Italian-American from New York, informed us, “They’re like the Gestapo over there.”
“I don’t know if the Gestapo ever mandated marriage.” James replied, “Wait, who told you that?”
“Gary and Danielle Hill.” Bennie answered, “They escaped from there.”
“They escaped? They didn’t just leave?”
“No. They run a tight ship up north.” Bennie continued. James and I looked at each other in disbelief, both of us wondering if Bennie was exaggerating or even fabricating the story all together. I made a mental note to find Gary and Danielle later that evening so I could ask.
“It’s supposedly like, very refined. Men have to work, women have to stay home.” Bennie went on. “There are lots of rules.”
“Do they dictate how many times a week you have to screw your wife, too? I could use that rule around here.” Wes, the least popular member of our group, mused. He expected us to laugh, and a few of the guys did. James, Bennie, Tom, Frank, and I gave each other the same look we always wore when he opened his mouth: one of disgusted disbelief at his ridiculous foulness.
“I hate that guy.” Bennie muttered as we walked.
“Yeah, he’s a tool.” Angie agreed, and we shared a quiet laugh.
We broke through the trees, the graveyard that was once our campsite looming in the distance against the mid-afternoon sun. We climbed the hill, talking about whatever random tidbits of our daily lives popped into our head.
“And in response to your question, Frank…” I said, “Alice and I aren’t thinking about getting married any time soon, either. Besides, we’re all basically married to the people we live with, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, man. Plus, how would we even get married?” Frank replied, “Aisha and I were talking about that last night. All that normal shit we’re used to from the old ways, even something like getting married, is gone.”
“It’s gone because it’s unnecessary.” James chimed in again, “Marriage was for show. I don’t need to be married to Brynn for me to know that I love her. You don’t need to be married to Alice; Frank, you don’t need to be married to Aisha, and Tom, you don’t need to be married to Tony.”
“You all are such guys!” Angie groaned loudly, “Bennie, listen to these idiots. Marriage isn’t for show, you old dog. It’s for commitment. It’s to show your boyfriend or girlfriend that you want to be in it with them ‘til the end. Maybe I’m just being a typical female about this, but it’s true.”
“Amen, girl.” Bennie replied.
“No, typical female.” I chimed in, and the guys all burst out laughing. Angie turned around and punched me in the arm.
“I’ve heard you talk, sir. You’re the most romantic guy I know. The way you talk about Allie, and you don’t want to marry her?” Angie challenged me.
“It’s not that. Frank is right. How would we even do it? And James is right. It isn’t necessary anymore.”
“Yes, it is!” Angie and Bennie exclaimed.
“Ooh, battle of the sexes!” Frank proclaimed dramatically.
“Hey, if you two want to marry your significant others, then by all means, go for it.” James told them as he held his hands up in surrender, “We’ll come to the festivities and drink all the booze.”
“Does Don allow gay marriage?” Bennie asked, “Would he even let Nicole and I get married?”
“Don is the most non-judgmental person on the planet. We’re lucky in that everyone in our house is non-judgmental, or at least they seem to be. I think anything goes, really. Now, if you were over in the Bachums camp, then no. You two, and Tony and Tom would get stoned to death.” Frank told her.
“They’d have to catch me first.” Tom said. 
“Exactly.” Bennie agreed, “I want to sneak over there and just watch them live.”
“You want to witness their misery. Sadist…” James shook his head in jokingly disgusted disbelief at her.
“Who says they’re miserable? I think some people like being restricted. It keeps them from having to think for themselves.”
“Oh, we’re getting deep!” James informed the rest of us.
“James Maxwell! You and your freaking sarcasm! At least Brynn gives you a run for…”
We stopped talking all at once. Our animal fangs shot out as our eyes turned white. There were others amongst us. I closed my eyes and smelled the air as I tried to determine the source of the warning that was pounding in my chest.
“They know we’re here.” I muttered to the rest of our group, “Remember that they have…”
Frank went down before the sound of the gunshot had even registered. All of us jumped to the ground before crawling to take cover behind rocks or by ducking back into the trees. The person was wielding a machine gun and firing off bullets without pause. Whoever it was, they were certainly not aiming. They were just firing into the distance where they had seen movement and hoping for a hit.
When there was a slight pause, Bennie jumped up from behind the rock she was crouched behind and pointed the Beretta we had stolen on our first trip at the person charging us. She aimed and fired expertly with no hesitation. With ease, she took down the assailant from almost forty feet away.
“Alright, let’s go!” She ordered before moving out from behind the rock. We jumped up and followed her. Don had supplied those of us who didn’t have guns with knives and spears. I grasped my knife firmly, trying to ignore the trembling in my arms and noting that I much preferred just fighting with my hands. I didn’t want to stab anyone.
“We should just go back!” Angie called to us as she and Henry, another guy on our team, lifted Frank onto his feet.
“You two take him back! We’ll handle this!” James ordered before looking at me, “You ready for this, man?”
“There’s no time to not be ready. Let’s go!”
We charged out, running right into two of the Bachums’ people. James made a valiant effort of trying to take one of them down by sliding in the mud towards the boy and kicking his feet out from under him. The boy he knocked down, however, pulled a handgun from the back of his pants and aimed right at James’s head. Quick as a flash, James jumped up and ducked behind some crates. The boy fired blindly at the crates, hoping to hit him, but James was crouched low to the ground, almost like he was doing a push-up. When the gunshots stopped, he barreled over the crates and punched the kid so hard in the face that his jaw snapped. The boy yelled in agony and spit teeth out onto the ground. Then, his wits returned, and he aimed the gun at James again. Blood spewed from his mouth as he shouted some gargled obscenity. James’s thought processes had abandoned him the same way mine would have if I were in a fight for my life. He was not aware that the person trying to kill him was just a young boy. He brought back his fist and hit him again, knocking him unconscious or worse.
For a moment, we stared at the kid, noting that he was probably younger than me. James shook his head slightly. I could see his guilt, and I sympathized with it.
“Come on. Let’s go.” I urged him, “Take his gun.”
James and I stared, hearing the gunfire all around us and the yells of the people, ours and theirs, clashing in a fight to the death.
“You take it.” He told me before sprinting off to find another opponent who was, hopefully, much older.
I stared at the motionless boy. I took his gun and ran after the other people in my party.
Several of them had wrestled guns from the Bachums’ people and were firing off bullets as best they could. I never aimed my gun at any of the people who charged me. Instead, I beat them into unconsciousness, remembering how I had said that killing them wasn’t necessary. Alice had told me that I would never know until I was on the receiving end of their merciless assault. Now, I could safely continue to say that I hadn't needed to break my rule...
One of them jumped onto my back and grasped both sides of my head. She struggled to twist it sideways but every muscle in my neck had tensed, making my head as impossible to turn as a rusted wheel. I flung my head back to nail the person hard in the face. After whipping around, I jumped on top of the woman and grabbed her hair. I pulled her head towards me and slammed it hard into the ground, that animal roar erupting from me with enough force to scare the second native that was charging me away.
Native… Why were there natives?
In that one second that it took for me to make that realization, the woman below me brought her fists back and hit me hard in the stomach. I grunted in pain, my breaths rasping as I tried to inhale. She pushed me backwards and got over top of me now. With a deafening screech, she brought her clawed hand back and scratched my cheek deeply. With her other hand, she did the same on the other side of my face. I spit a mouthful of blood at her, and she was blinded for only a minute. She screamed in surprise, but I lunged forward to tackle her around the middle. Once she had collapsed back into the mud, I got above her again.
I was breathing raspy breaths at her for a minute, my blood dripping onto her face as she shrieked and roared at me in burning, animal rage. I brought my head back and slammed it down into hers twice, ignoring the dizziness that was bound to follow two head-butts.
The gun had flown from my hand, and I reached sideways for it. That movement gave her just enough time to pull a twisted dagger from the pocket of her black dress. I tried to brace for the blow, but no thought or physical tensing could have prepared me for the unbearable pain of being stabbed straight through the stomach.
I didn’t scream; it felt as though my lungs had deflated. I could only gargle and hold my stomach as blood poured over my hands. I fell backwards, kicked my feet and arched upwards, trying desperately to apply pressure to the wound but instead, only paining myself more. While struggling for a breath, for enough air to yell out, I watched her crawl over top of me and raise her knife for the final blow. There was only one defense that my strength would allow; I kicked her once and sent her hurtling backwards.
I tried to push my way away from her towards the gun. As she stood back up, I kicked my feet harder and faster, propelling myself across the ground with strength that was beginning to fade slowly with the effort. When she lunged through the air, her white eyes ablaze with fury and her own lion-like teeth on display, I reached back and finally, thankfully, grabbed the gun.
The safety… I had heard the term before, but that didn’t mean I knew what it meant. I pushed something on the side of the gun and then aimed. Just as she was about to plunge her knife into my chest upon landing on me, I fired off every bullet in the chamber.
She fell on top of me, hissing and snarling weakly in my ear. I struggled to push her, off but the exertion was too painful. I moaned in pain as I turned over onto my side; she fell off of me, but that was the least of my concerns. I reached back slowly, my arm trembling, and ran my hand down my back.
“Oh, man…” I muttered, and a maniacal giggle burst from me. I had to have been going delirious from the blood loss and the pain. “Bitch stabbed me straight through…”
I laid down and my laughter died away as quickly as it had come alive. I stared up at the sun that was hiding behind the thick, eerily gray clouds. Nature was completely untarnished on Pangaea; all the colors, light and dark, were more brilliant than anything we had ever seen on Earth. I thought about Earth for a long while, wondering if I would trade the death that was sure to be slow and agonizing for the quick, explosive death that had wiped out the population on our home planet.
“Alice…” I muttered aloud in response to my mind reminding me that on Pangaea, Alice and I had gotten what we had always wanted. We had gotten what would have been denied us by the progression of an Earthly life.
I worried that she would be very sad. I knew that if the situation were reversed, I would be inconsolable.
I had to put my faith in her strength now. She would survive. I knew that. She would be taken care of by Brynna and James. She would have a family of sorts, made up of the other people in the house. I knew that she would grieve, but I also knew that my death wouldn’t be her own, too.
I closed my eyes.

Violet

The chaos in the foyer of the house drew us away from our work. Brynna had been distracted all morning; at least once an hour, she would stop abruptly in the middle of whatever task she had been assigned to close her eyes and hold her heart with one hand. When I inquired if she was alright, she muttered that she was and forced herself to resume her work immediately. At one point, she leaned forward to put her hands on her knees and hung her head. Some dark knowing was plaguing her. Some premonition of an awful event was snaking around her and snatching the precious breaths in her lungs.
“Let’s go get some air.” Alice told her. When Brynna shook her head, Alice took one of her arms and led her out of the room.
They disappeared for about ten minutes. When they returned, all the color had drained from Alice’s face.
Brynna and Alice were the first to run from the kitchen towards the entrance hall. Brynna was well aware that whatever terrible thing that had been pulling at her instincts all morning had finally occurred.
“What happened?!” I heard Alice scream. I rounded the corner and gasped sharply upon seeing the sight.
All of the men and women in security were either covered in their own blood or the blood of another. Dirt had caked onto their shoes, splattered up their legs, and covered their torsos. The ones either unconscious or dead, I couldn’t know, were being carried or dragged along by those still able to move.
“Ten of them… Ten of them came through the gate…”
“Quinn! Oh God! Oh my God!” I knelt beside Alice and grasped her shoulders. I moved down to press my face to the side of hers.
“It’s going to be okay…” I whispered in a trembling voice, “He's going to be okay...”
Ten of them were coming our way...
“Are they armed?!” Don demanded after he had stormed into the room. When I looked up at him, I saw that his eyes were red with the blaze of fury.
James nodded in response before he and Brynna took off out of the house.
“Brynna!” I screamed in terror as I jumped up to run after her. But a hand grasped my arm roughly and threw me back to Alice. Elijah was going after her, too. Wes, Bennie, and Tom followed after him.
“Stay with him. I’ll be right back!” I told Alice. She nodded, and I ran onto the porch, my entire body trembling so viciously that I was finding it difficult to move at a pace the situation required.
The Bachums had coerced some natives to join their side. Their group charged our group. Guns were fired, and someone went down. I jumped out of the way as five stray bullets came whizzing at me, quicker than one beat of my racing heart. I crawled to the wooden post of the porch and peeked out, watching as Brynna ran forward in a blur, jumped, planted her foot in the stomach of one of the charging natives and flipped in a complete circle over his head.
“Whoa!” I was unable to hide my awe, even under the highly dangerous circumstances.
Her back was to the native, who had jumped up and turned to face her. She swung her arm back, and I saw for the first time that she had brought the knife she had been using in the kitchen. With a fluid movement, she sliced into the man’s throat and then flipped him over her shoulder without ever turning around completely to face him.
“Keep at least one alive!” Don’s deafening shout behind me made me jump.
Elijah had the upper-hand in his fight. He was one deadly strike away from killing his opponent. Instead of ripping into his flesh with his fangs, he thrust his fist forward hard enough to send the man flying backwards several feet.
When they had won, they returned, huffing and puffing from the effort. James’s arm was wrapped tightly around Brynna’s shoulders. Her own were locked around his middle. They were keeping each other close after facing such a dangerous threat.
Elijah and Wes were dragging the unconscious man Elijah had taken down. Tom was carrying a huge native man on his shoulders without even a grimace.
“One native, one Bachum…” Tom said as he threw his body forward so that the native landed hard on his back with a painful thud.
“Perfect.” Don replied in a voice lacking emotion. “Get them downstairs.”
Brynna pulled me up, and I squeezed her hand in both of mine as we walked. I let go only to grab hold of her arm. I rested my head on her shoulder as we entered the house again.
The injured were being carried upstairs. We had only four doctors in our group. They were coming upstairs from the basement where they and several others had been trying to fashion an office and an examination room for them to use.
“Alright, I need anything clean that can be used to stop the bleeding. I need anything that can be used as bandages. I need alcohol.” One of them demanded quickly.
Several people were off in search of those items.
We followed them upstairs and began to immediately search for Alice.
“Put them in here. It’s the most space.” Don instructed. He was pointing to his own room, the master suite.
Alice was sobbing beside Quinn and grasping his hand tightly.
“I don’t think he’s breathing!” She cried hysterically. When she looked up at us, we saw the black lines smeared down her face from the mix of tears and mascara.
I didn’t know what to say and neither did James or Elijah. There are few words that can comfort those preparing to lose ones they love. That is a truth that has never changed.
“It is alright. Look at me. Alice, look at me.” Brynna was knelt on the other side of Quinn. Dr. Anthony tossed her one of the First Aid kits that had been foraged from the ship.
“Do the best you can.” He told her hurriedly, and she nodded. I noticed that her hands were only trembling slightly.
“I am going to do everything in my power, Allie. I promise.” Brynna told her. My sister's eyes were still fixed on our friend's even as her hands pulled out the gauze from the kit and pressed it to Quinn’s wound almost by their own will.
“But you’re not a doctor… We need him…”
“I will not be offended by your lack of faith. Guys, I need alcohol,” She ordered us over her shoulder, “And Don is calling Adam. When he gets here, tell him that I need to see him.”
“Brynn, the last person we…” James started to say.
“Alcohol, James! Now!” She barked at us before pushing harder on Quinn’s wound. His body jerked forward, and he moaned softly.
“He’s alive. He can still feel pain. That’s a good sign.” Brynna told Alice soothingly. Alice nodded and kissed Quinn's hand twice.
“What can I do?” Alice managed to whisper to Brynna.
“Talk to him. Keep him with us.”
Alice nodded again and moved closer to Quinn’s head so he could hear her voice.
“Hey, baby…” She whispered through her shuddering sobs, “I’m right here. We’re all right here. Brynn is going to help you. She’s going to do everything she can. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to make you better, okay? I’m not going to let you go anywhere. I promise.”
James handed Brynna a small bottle of vodka. Those tiny bottles had been very popular on the ship at nighttime, when people from all over came together to talk and socialize before they all went to bed. I had always been annoyed by the noise those drunken people made in the rec-room, which was three floors above where we slept. But now, I was definitely thankful for the bottles.
“Shh…” Alice whispered after putting her hand on Quinn’s face. He had jumped again when Brynna poured the alcohol onto his stomach, “It’s okay, baby. I know it stings, but it’s going to help you. It will. I promise.”
“You requested to see me, Ms. Olivier?”
Everyone except for Brynna jumped upon finding Adam standing right beside our group.
“Oh, wipe that smirk off of your face!” She snapped at him angrily. I gasped and covered my mouth, stunned that she would call him on his cruel arrogance and the joy he was clearly experiencing at witnessing our misfortune. I wanted to shakily remind her that if he wanted, he could easily murder each and every one of us.
“I apologize.”
My brows crinkled together in confusion. Had my sister's scathing nature really gotten Adam, the leader of an entire planet, to apologize sincerely?
“I need to know how severe his wound is. I need to know if anything got damaged, and what I should do.”
“Oh, do you?” He asked with his eyebrows raised and a smirk on his face again.
Quinn started trembling, slightly at first. But then, as though we had pressed a fully charged defibrillator to his chest (which, given his condition, would have been very useful), his body jumped off of the ground, twitching and jerking wildly.
“Quinn!” Alice was wailing now. I embraced her again as tears streamed down my cheeks. She was trying to hold him down, but Brynna broke her grip.
“Just let it run its course.” She ordered softly, “He has lost a lot of blood.” When she addressed Adam, her warmth froze over, and a violent scowl of impatience took hold of her features.
“What do you want?”
“What do you think I want? Mr. Maxwell, I have had all that I can stand of you and will gladly snap you in half if you step towards me aggressively. Please think again.” His eyes were blazing when he looked at James.
“Brynna, do not agree to this. Don’t listen to him!” James ordered her.
“He’s going to die any second now, James.” Brynna looked at Alice and then back at Quinn, who had gone motionless. “He has two minutes, maybe less.”
“Just tell him you’ll do what he wants!” Alice screamed at her pleadingly, “Please, Brynna! Please!”
Brynna looked up at James, a desperation in her eyes that I had never seen before. As quickly as I had noticed it, it was gone. Her resolve had returned.
“I will handle this myself, thank you so much.” She shot at Adam, “Carry on.”
Adam chuckled softly and turned to walk away.
“Without blood, he will pass. You will need Elixir, which I supplied to your leader just yesterday.”
“Yes…” Brynna realized in a soft whisper. She looked up at Elijah and me.
“Where is it?” I asked immediately.
“It is downstairs where they were building. It is dark blue, almost black, with purple around the edges. It is a medium-sized leaf. Go! Hurry up!”
Elijah and I ran downstairs, almost knocking over those who were waiting in the hallway for news, because we were in such a rush. We stormed into the basement, avoiding the corridor that led to the very last floor of the house. We ran down the hallway lit with torches. When we entered the room where the doctors had been working, we rooted through their large bags of medicinal supplies until we found the very leaves Brynna had described.
“What does this do?” Elijah asked.
“Who cares?” I responded as we took off running again, “If he says it will work, and if Brynna believes him, then it will work!”
When we returned, Adam was healing Bennie's gunshot wound. His hands were covered in blood; he had dug into the wound in order to extract the bullet. I grimaced.
When I handed her the leaf, Brynna put it in her mouth and chewed it up as quickly as she could. Once or twice, she scrunched up her face in disgust. Apparently, it wasn’t the most appetizing of plants.
“Open his mouth.”
“Oh, gross…” Elijah murmured. He turned away with his hands over his eyes.
“Shut up, Eli!” Brynna, Alice, and I yelled simultaneously. I grasped Quinn's head and tilted it back so Alice could pull his mouth open. Brynna spat the spit-saturated leaf into her hand and shoved it into Quinn’s mouth. Her fingers pressed to the artery in his neck that, given her expression, I could gather was barely pulsing anymore.
“He’s not swallowing it!” Alice cried, “Damn it!” She pushed her fingers down into his throat, forcing the mashed-up leaf down further, “It’s down! It’s down!”
“Alright.” Brynna nodded, “Now, we just have to wait.”
As she sat back, she looked over at Adam, scowling once again. When James sat beside her, she took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulder.
“He ever looks at you like that again…” James muttered to her, and I noticed for the first time that not only had his irises turned red but so had the whites of his eyes. I looked down, knowing that James had reached the level of anger humans simply could not achieve. If ever there was a time when he was unthinkably dangerous, it was during those moments of unspeakable outrage.
“Look at me.” Brynna whispered to him. She grasped his chin and looked up into his eyes. Now, I looked at them again. Her blue eyes were glowing with the calming tranquility of the ocean to extinguish the fire that burned in James’s. His eyes returned to normal.
“Guys, look! Look!” Alice exclaimed. When we did, we saw her pointing to the wound in Quinn’s stomach. We all leaned in to watch as his skin pulled back together. It was as though an invisible needle was sewing the wound closed. Color was returning to his face as his breath began to draw in and let go quietly.
“You did it! Brynn, you did it!” Alice screamed in shameless glee. She reached out, pulled Brynna forward, and squeezed her so tightly that Brynna frowned in pain.
“I have a slight fear of suffocation…” Brynna told her. But she was patting Alice's back and smiling slightly.
“Thank you! Thank you!” Alice was crying.
“Well, there is little need for tears now, my dear.”
Typical Brynna, so uncomfortable with outpourings of any emotion that wasn’t blind rage. Alice apologized and wiped her tears away.
“You’re right. He’s going to be okay. You saved his life.”
“We all saved his life. We all helped.” Brynna corrected her.
“Call Guinness, ladies and gentlemen. Brynna Oliver has said something humble!” James exclaimed. Brynna reached back and slapped him lightly in the chest, a gesture she seemed to favor when she was looking to offset his sarcasm.
“As if you can say anything about being humble…” She told him.
“I know.” He kissed her forehead and continued to rub her back even after his lips had left her skin.
“Alright, children, any more PDA, and Elijah is bound to explode.” I warned them quickly.  Elijah was clenching his jaw and his fists as he looked at them.
“What is that?” James indicated his stance, “You look like you’re having digestive issues. It’s not a good look for you. It’s not a good look for anyone, actually.”
“Stop it.” Brynna told him as she covered her mouth to stifle a laugh.
“Yeah, and being a pedophile isn’t just a bad look, it’s also a crime.”
“Elijah!” I exclaimed in shock.
“Don’t fret, Violet.” James said in his normal tone of breezy arrogance, “He is completely clueless as to what constitutes pedophilia, I guess. Let me inform you, sweetheart,” He said to Elijah, 
“That by old world standards, the term was defined generally as a sexual relationship between an adult and a child under the age of eighteen. Given that your sister is twenty-two years old, I just don’t fit the bill. I’m sorry to have to call you on your stupidity, but hey, what can you do?”
Elijah was steaming at being torn down so effortlessly. I tried to remain neutral in the argument, but his hatred of James was over the top and unnecessary. James had hurt Brynna once while under the influence of a drug that he had never taken again. Everyone in the house could see how deeply he loved her. Everyone could also see that the feeling was mutual; Brynna loved him right back and just as much.
“Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?”
“Why? Because I’m with your sister, or because I made you look like a whining, temper tantrum-throwing little boy? That certainly isn’t a good look for you, either.”
“What kind of a man gets with a girl her age? Oh, see, that was wrong of me. I called you a man. You’re not a man…”
“Gentlemen!” Brynna stood up and stepped in between them, “That is enough!”
“What would Mom say?!” Elijah snapped at her. Brynna opened her mouth to retort, but he cut her off. “Right, you don’t care about that. You don’t care anything about Mom. I know he talked you into letting her die. Are you that desperate to have him that you would let him talk you into that?”
“First of all, I am not desperate to have him. I never groveled for his affections nor did I compromise any aspect of myself, so you had better think twice before you hurl that accusation at me!” Brynna hissed at him.
I groaned as I watched the blue of her eyes swirl with flecks of red now.
“Secondly, if you ever insinuate that it was James who coerced me into abandoning our mother on Earth…”
“You’ll what? Are you going to kill me? That would be the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it?! You’d kill me for him the same way you killed Mom for…”
When she hit him, he flew backwards and almost knocked over Nikki, Bennie's girlfriend.
“That’s enough.” James told her as she struggled to break his grip on her hands. “It's alright, baby. It's okay. Come on. Let’s go.”
But Elijah had waited weeks to fight that battle. The venue and the time were not appropriate, but he was going to say his piece now, for better or worse. Instead of shouting an obscenity-laced tirade full of insults and insinuations, he ran forward to tackle James around the middle. Alice and I exclaimed as we jumped onto our feet. Brynna simply watched with her arms crossed over her chest. All the while, she shook her head in disgust and rolled her eyes.
Elijah never even grasped the upper-hand in the fight. James was faster and stronger; tossing Elijah about was like throwing a paper doll. Never once did he hit him, though Elijah managed to land a few punches.
“Are you done?” James finally barked at him as he held Elijah against the wall. “Tell me you’re done, and I’ll let you go.”
“I have had it with this.” Brynna spoke up suddenly. They both looked back at her to find that she was resting her head against her hand and squeezing her eyes shut.
“Baby…” James started to say.
“Don’t you two understand that this is the last thing we need right now!?” She had lifted her head to glare at them. “I am an adult, Elijah Daniel, and I will make my own decisions. He is just angry, James, and there is no reason for you to engage him physically! With your strength, you could easily crush him, so learn some self-control!”
“He could not easily…” Elijah started to say.
“Shut up!” She stomped her foot in frustration, “I do not care if you approve of our relationship or not, Eli. We are together. For your own sake, you must learn to deal with that. I know that your rejection of the idea is bred from your brotherly affection for me. I know that you feel it is your duty to protect me the way our father never did. I appreciate that. Believe me, I do. But James is alright, don’t you see that? You know me. If I can trust him, then there is absolutely no reason why you cannot do the same.”
“So, what do you want?” Elijah wiped the blood away from his mouth and laughed slightly in aggravation, “Do you want us to shake hands? Do you want me to give you my blessing?”
“No. I just do not want to fight with you anymore. I am so tired of this never-ceasing familial strife. We have a chance here to start completely over. What Quinn said the other night was true; we are all we have from our old lives. We need to stick together. Do you all agree?”
She was so exhausted by the fight that had endured for hundreds of colorful reasons for thirteen years. It was evident in her eyes as she spoke. She had always been expected to carry the brunt of the weight. Now, the fatigue was beginning to show. The fight between Elijah and James was yet another conflict that was up to her to resolve. I admired her strength as I was seeing it through an untarnished lens for the first time in years. But I also couldn’t help but pity her for how cruelly unfair her life had been. Tears ran down my cheeks at the thought of it.
“I agree.” I told her instantly after walking over to grasp her hand. “And I just want you to be happy, Brynn. And James, you know I love you.” I wiped at my eyes.
“I know you do, and I love you, too.” He told me, “I love you and Penny just as much as she does.”
“Eli, she’s right. We need to stop all of this conflict. It has gone on for too long. You were gone. She had to handle everything. She had to raise Penny and me. She had to take their abuse for what happened to Lucien…”
“I do not want or need any pity for all of that, honey…” Brynna started to say quietly.
“I don’t want him to pity you, either. I just want him to understand that if you want to be with James, then you should be! Even now, you’re still the one taking care of us. You made the decisions that we couldn’t make. I wish that we had been able to save Mom. But I know that even if you deny it, you do feel guilty about it. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been.”
She offered no response. She would never admit feeling any regret in her decision.
“I am tired of the drama, too.” Elijah told us wearily, “But I can’t accept him. He is too old for you, Brynna. You’re nothing but his midlife crisis!”
“Well, I’m going to be stuck in midlife forever, so what does that say about our relationship’s longevity?” James shot back at him, “It’s a losing battle, ladies. Just throw in the…”
“You must truly think I am stupid.” Brynna told Elijah dangerously. “Your anger is at no one else but me. What you said about our mother proved that. You are projecting your anger onto him...”
“Yeah, I'm pissed about Mom!” Elijah interrupted her loudly, “You're right as always, Brynna! How in the world did you guess that I'm pissed about Mom being dead?! I can't believe that you left her behind. I can't even begin to understand how you can have so much evil in your heart, evil that could make you do something like that! But I also know that he insisted on leaving her. You went along with it because he insisted!”
“Our parents were both barred from the ship, not by him, but by the group as a whole. Our mother would have been saved had she not chosen to associate with that merry band of morons she called her colleagues. You hold our mother to a standard of God-like perfection, Eli, and you always have! You do the same, though slightly less so, with Maura. Neither of them are what you believe them to be. I can give you props, however, because you do see our father for what he is. They are the type who have no place here. They deserved no new beginning.”
“How can you say that?!” Elijah demanded furiously, “How can you talk about them like that?”
“Because if our mother and her little friends hadn't pissed off everyone from America to Australia, we'd still be breathing the air on Earth. If they hadn't done everything in their power to destroy our planet...”
“They didn't know what they were doing!”
“And you think that they shouldn't be faulted for that ignorance, which yielded such catastrophic results?!” James asked him in fury, “The entire world is gone! They started a goddamn nuclear war! If they had just kept their noses out of other people's business...”
“My mother was trying to help people!” Elijah screamed at them, unable to keep the cap on his anger now. “Besides, we don't even know for sure that it was a nuclear war!”
“Brynna, what did Mom do, exactly?” 
I wasn't sure if I even wanted to know. I had been too naïve, too blinded by my need for her love to see her clearly. Brynna, despite her ill feelings towards my mother, would only speak the truth about her, for my sake. Unfortunately, the truth was so shameful that it beat any bold-faced lie she could have told that would make me see our mom in the same dark light that she did.
“Now is not the time.” Brynna told me, and her blue eyes were set in stone.
“Yes it is, Brynna. You're accusing him of holding her to a standard she doesn't deserve. Yet, here you are, protecting her.”
“I protect her still because she was very weak. She believed herself to be so strong but she could carry nothing, not even the lightest of burdens.”
“She carried you, didn't she?”
“Are we speaking of carrying in the physical sense or in the metaphorical? Because in regards to the former, yes, she did carry me for nine...”
“Shut up!” Elijah snapped at her, “And don't spread your lies to Violet! Don't try to make her see Mom the way you see her! You hated her for no reason! She wasn't home, yes. She had a drinking problem...”
“She was a raging alcoholic, Elijah, and you know that to be truthful!”
“She said some things to you that she didn't mean. You know she didn't mean that stuff she said!”
“Which is why she spewed that venom at me for twelve years, if she spoke to me at all...”
“Well, maybe you should have kept your eyes open when you were watching Lucien! Maybe you should have stayed awake!”
“Is that what they told you?!” Brynna was screaming now, “They told you I was asleep?!”
“We all know that she was young, and she shouldn't have been watching him in the first place, Eli...” I started to say in an effort to diffuse the almost excruciatingly strong tension.
“I was not asleep! What did they tell you about Michael?! Did they tell you that he could heal sick children with a touch of his hand and raise the dead from their graves?! What did they tell you about where he went?”
“You shut up about him!” Elijah pointed at her with a shaking hand, “Dad was gone. Michael was the only father we ever had! If he hadn't gotten killed in Iran...”
Brynna slammed her fists down onto the table that she had walked behind. Her eyes had finally turned completely red.
“So, now he is a war hero? Now, they put him up with the men and women who really did lose their lives in that pitilessly stupid war they started!? That's what they told you!?”
Oh, the conflict of so many years was erupting in a display of explosions that rivaled any that occurred in an action film. Every part of our history they disagreed on was going to be shouted about now to no end. I knew very little of the truth, but Brynna knew it all. I was going to hear the secrets that had been kept buried deep, spoken of in looks and silences too heavy to understand at such a tender age.
“That's what they told me. So, where is he really, Brynna? I'm interested to hear this. I'm interested to hear whatever ridiculous lie you're going to tell about him now! You lie about all the people who ever loved you. Why?! He loved us like his own! He loved you like his own!”
Brynna laughed maniacally and threw her hands up.
“Oh, yes, he loved me, Elijah!”
“Let's go. Let's go get some air, baby.” James had grasped Brynna's arms gently, seeing in her what I hadn't yet realized: She was going to cry.
“There was only one way for him to show me how much he loved me!”
I thought I was finally old enough to understand all the dirty secrets. But I didn't grasp what she was alluding to.
“What are you even talking about? You know what, don't even tell me, okay? Because it's probably just some insane lie that you thought up. In fact, he probably thought it up, just so he could help you lie to yourself! That's what you do, isn't it, James? You give her complete freedom from any responsibility. You let her believe what she wants to believe while everyone else reminds her what she did when she tries to forget it!”
James was on Elijah in a flash, grabbing the front of his shirt in both hands and slamming him down onto the table. I did not rush to his defense. I watched him struggle to break James's iron grip only to discover that with that rage inside of him and with that new, brutal strength, James was impossible to fight.
“You need to take a very hard look back at the life you lived on Earth, Elijah. You need to start searching for some inconsistencies. All these things you're saying, all these ridiculous beliefs with no grounding in reality, are the result of the fact that you are too young and too weak to see things for what they are. You accuse her of being so weak that she needs me to lie to her while you stand back and lie to yourself constantly. I was led to believe that you're a smart kid. Stop hiding from it! Be a man for once in your goddamn life!”
“Because you're the authority on what constitutes being a man, right? You, with your girlfriend who is young enough to be your kid, who you...”
“When you finally do discover the truth about those people you're defending, this fight that you claim is in defense of your sister will be rendered completely useless. You'll see that I am the only man who has ever been able to protect her. I am the only man who has ever treated her right.”
James released him and walked back to Brynna, who was grasping the apple charm on her bracelet. There was sadness in her eyes that she was too exhausted to hide. Intermixed with the sadness was the fear of a cornered animal waiting for the strike of death. I was starting to understand the sickening truth which, for Brynna, was worse than her own death. For me to see the true catalyst behind her emotional coldness and arrogance was worse than me believing her to just be a heartless shrew whose soul had long fled her.
“Brynna!” I ran after her and James.
“I'm sorry. I had to say it. I couldn't take it, baby. I'm sorry.” He had been whispering to her as he walked her along.
She cleared her throat before turning to me to reveal that the look in her eyes had only intensified the further away she got from Elijah. It took my breath away for a moment. When I swallowed and tried to take a breath, I discovered that my throat had tightened under the threat of tears.
“What?” She asked, her voice neither rising in anger nor falling in sadness. There was simply nothing there when she spoke.
I needed to ask for confirmation that would solidify what I knew to be true: Uncle Mike had raped her when she was just a child. I couldn't begin to guess how long it had gone on. But I knew that the effects had reverberated through her young life, twisting and contorting her mind into what it was currently. The event had spawned an alien creature incapable of learning the ways of those considered normal. It had made her an outcast. Tears leaked from my eyes that I furiously wiped away. I understood why she loathed the weakness of tears now; if she was pushing her way through life with dry eyes, then I sure as hell had better do the same. There was no reason for my constant whining and crying.
“Was it the worst?” I was trying to steady my voice when I spoke.
She studied me for a long second. She would tell me later that she was both surprised, impressed, and very thankful for my tact in not using any heavy words to describe what had happened with “Uncle Mike”; words like “rape” or “assault” sent chills down her spine and turned her stomach.
“Yes.” She answered.
I tried to suppress my tears, but the guilt and shame over judging her so harshly were too much to bear.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“It was not, and still isn't, a burden I wish for you to carry. It’s mine.”
“And Luc?”
Now, the pain in her eyes intensified, and her grip on James's arms tightened. He was holding her around the middle from behind. Because of how pale her skin was and how badly she was shaking, I worried briefly that he was the only reason she was still standing. When she spoke, her hands began to run up and down his arms somewhat neurotically.
“I looked away, and by the time I looked back, he was gone.”
Even speaking of our brother, whom we both loved dearly, didn't evoke a shred of emotion in her voice.
“Did Maura know?”
She looked away from me and up at James for a minute. The question that came over her eyes answered my own. She was unsure whether she wanted to defile the high perception I had of Maura, our mother, and our father. I reached out, closed my eyes, and held onto the wall as I tried to gather my thoughts.
“Tell me they didn't know, Brynna. Tell me that they tried to stop it.”
“Our mother did. Our father didn't believe me. Maura was present.”
I lurched forward, so horribly sickened by the fact that Maura had not stopped such senseless, sick violence. My youth could not be blamed for why I didn't understand. There was no explanation. There was no excuse.
“How did you ever look at her? How did you ever forgive her?”
“Because Maura was weak like our mother, and I knew that from a very young age. I was the victim of her weakness, however. She paid no price for it. She still has not paid for it.”
“How could you have saved her? How could you have saved her from Earth? She doesn't deserve...”
“Perhaps she does deserve life, and perhaps she does not. I owed her a debt. If it were not for her, I would not have survived infancy. If she had not cared for me, I would not have grown up to care for you and Penny. You two would not exist, either.”
“But it's so wrong!” I wanted to reach out and throw my arms around her. I needed her to comfort me when the situation called for the reverse.
“Yes.” She replied vaguely. I got the feeling that she didn't know what else to say.
“How can you not hate her? I hate her now! I hate them all for letting it happen and for blaming you for Lucien...”
“Violet...” She whispered, and warmth finally emerged in her words. I felt her hands on my face, and her thumbs wiping my tears away. “I have had this huge anger inside of me for many years. That rage plants the most insidious, detrimental thoughts in one's mind. I do not wish that for you. Everything that has happened to me is my own burden to carry, like I said. Do not add to that weight by embracing anger, rejection, and despondency. It is useless now. It was useless then, as well.”
“But it's not fair!”
“You know exactly which cliché I am going to utilize, so I will not even say it.”
“I know. ‘Life isn't fair.’”
“Indeed. We are safe now. We have created a new life. You were happy before this conversation, weren't you?”
I nodded.
“I love it here.” I told her honestly.
“I know. If all of the things that happened on Earth were payment for the happiness we are currently experiencing, then it was worth it. It was worth this chance at something better than what we would have had. Okay?”
I nodded and looked up at her. Then, I turned my gaze to James.
“James, I know it's an uphill battle, but you better take care of her.”
“I can take perfectly satisfactory care of myself, thank you so much.” Brynna told me with the usual sass in her voice. Her tone reassured me that she was returning to normal.
“Fine. Then how about this? James, take care of her when she finds herself incapable of taking care of herself. Is that better?”
“Indeed. But I will never be unable to take care of myself, but the thought that I will have the gorgeous Mr. Maxwell to aid me if ever I could not is comforting.”
“I've learned to navigate these conversational minefields she sets up.” James told me, “You need to start watching your step. She'll get you.”
“I know she will. But I'm serious.”
“And I will do just that, Vi. You don't need to worry about that. It is my job to put her above myself, and I do. I always do.”
I nodded, feeling genuinely relieved. I looked between the two of them for a moment. Though they fought, there was a durability to their relationship now that was far superior to anything that could be experienced in the early stages of a romance on Earth. It was odd to think that two people who had only met eleven months earlier would be capable of having such deep feelings for one another. But the forces of the universe were strong and insistent that they meet and fall in love, never to part for the duration of their eternal lives. I wondered if they would have children together.
“My stars, Violet Mae!” Brynna exclaimed, and she grasped her chest in shock.
“What? What?” I asked as the panic pulled me from the depth of my thoughts. My thoughts... I gasped and covered my ears. “Stop doing that!”
“Children!?” She repeated, “Are you daft?!”
She grasped James's hands tightly to steady herself.
“Oh, no...” James replied, shaking his head back and forth quickly. “We have more than our fair share with you and Penny. Actually, come to think of it, we have the best of both worlds with you two; we have the teenager to make us pull our hair out, and the precious, angelic little girl to shower with love and gifts.”
“What are you going to shower me with, then?” I put my hands on my hips in mock indignation.
“Advice and stern warnings.” James answered immediately. Brynna and I both broke out into laughter. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. I knew that she was comforted by his inclusion in our lives and how openly he discussed being present in the long run. It was consistency and stability that had never been given to her, for whatever reason.
Everything should have looked up from there. But then, we had been saying that for far too long. It was while we were picking up Penny from the kitchen that we knew, beyond any doubt, that something terrible was brewing.
An almost tangible rage and tension laid heavily over the house like a blanket of smog. People were shouting, running, and demanding blood in the name of those we had lost. When Don passed us calmly, he listened to their demands but said nothing. I saw more white eyes and fangs than I should have been comfortable with. People were ready to go to war.
“Brynn!” Penny ran to us, her ballerina flats pattering against the floor almost noiselessly. She jumped into Brynna's arms and squeezed her tightly.
“Hey, baby,” Brynna greeted her soothingly in an attempt to pretend like nothing was wrong. “Did you have fun?”
“Everyone is yelling and running! Everyone is mad!” Penny looked between the three of us. “I'm scared because they're loud, and they have sharp teeth, and their eyes are scary! I wanted to come find you!”
“No.” Brynna replied firmly, “You do not ever leave the person that I ask to watch you, Penelope.”
A genuine fear was in Brynna’s eyes, one that was there and gone in a matter of seconds. It had emerged at the thought of being unable to find Penny.
“Don't be afraid, honey.” Brynna nuzzled Penny gently with her head. “No one's going to hurt you. We are just going to go upstairs and play until dinner, okay?”
Penny nodded and reached her tiny arms out to James. Brynna handed her over and rubbed her back for a minute when Penny laid her head against his.
“Alright, come on....”
We opened the door to leave the kitchen only to find Adam and Don standing right in our path.
“Can you two talk?” Don asked, “It's very important.”
“No.” Brynna and James replied simultaneously as they pushed past them.
“We're going after the Bachums. We're going to need all the able-bodied people we can find.”
“Funny, baby, I thought we told them that we couldn't talk?” James told Brynna.
“Yes, that is quite humorous. I remember saying that, as well.” Brynna replied.
“They have crossed over onto our land, killed our people senselessly and unfairly...”
“They threaten your very place on Purissimus.” Adam added convincingly. I knew that his eyes were only on Brynna. “You will fight them sooner or later, if you wish to stay.”
“No, I will not. Coincidentally, Adam, you have some rogue civilians joined up with the other team. Either that, or you are playing Don for a fool, which I am sure is none too difficult.”
“To what are you referring?”
“Oh, just the people clearly from this planet who we saw fighting alongside the Bachums’ people. No big deal.” James replied airily.
“Those were not my people.” Adam informed him with a soft chuckle of derision. “They are the Old Spirits, far removed from my city. Their allegiance with the others is not surprising. They favor ruthless, pious action to appease the one God. Both the Bachums and the Old Spirits remain rooted firmly in the past that simply cannot exist nowadays. It is unsurprising.”
“Maybe it is evidence, though, that you have no handle on the people of your world so you should stop trying to have a handle on the people from ours. Just a thought...” James continued.
“We are going down to question those we took.” Don interrupted them. I noted that he looked even tinier in Adam's shadow. “James, Brynna, I'd like for you to accompany me.”
“Yes.” Brynna replied, “And I would like five minutes of peace and a unicorn, but those are simply not options, are they?”
“There is no other option for the two of you right now. You will either join us or suffer the consequences.” Adam informed them dryly.
“And what, dare I ask, are the consequences? I thought there were no laws here, Don. I thought that nothing was required.”
“It's not.” Don replied timidly. He shrunk even more under Brynna's harsh stare. “It's not required by me, at least. But he has final say.”
“Whatever fear I had of you has officially been pacified.” James told Don sarcastically. Don scowled at him.
“I wield power you cannot possibly imagine, James. If you're not afraid of me, you certainly should be.”
“You're just the sidekick. If I'm not afraid of the boss, why would I be afraid of his right-hand man?”
“You're making me very angry.”
“And what? I won't like you when you're angry?” James pressed him tauntingly.
“No, you won't. We have been gifted with powers, James. Do you want to know what mine is? I can harness emotional energy. With it, I can...” He closed his eyes for a moment, and the floor beneath our feet began to shake. At first, it was only a slight rumble, similar to what is felt when a car is turned on. But then, the foundation of the house began to tremble; people were running and screaming past us, trying to get out before the whole structure crumpled to the ground. Penny was crying, and James was holding her close with both hands. I held onto Brynna, screaming with the others, as the torches lighting the hallway flickered and went out. Throughout the duration of that man-made earthquake, Adam merely smiled and leaned against the wall, observing the dust that fell from the ceiling.
“Stop it!” Brynna screamed at him after finally stepping forward. She glared into his eyes when he opened them again. He lurched forward, stumbling several steps, looking alarmed. The shaking ceased.
“All you had to do, Don, was ask nicely.” Brynna hissed at him as he crumpled to his knees, holding his temples. “Do you want to know what my power is? I can see and understand things of which you know nothing. I can see every thought in your mind, all sadness that you have held in your heart and every fear from which you have ever run. If that demonstration of strength was meant to make us succumb to your will, then know this: I can make that very power you harness destroy you from the inside out. James can rip you apart without stopping for breath. Now, what was it that you wanted from us?”
It all made sense now; we were predestined for the powers we now wielded. Brynna had always been unthinkably intelligent, but now she could read our minds and hearts while sensing future events by instinct alone. She understood the forces of the universe, how they shifted and contorted to warn us of impending danger. I had always been prone to violent rages, petrifying anxiety, and crippling depression. There had been times when I was sure those storms of feeling would be the end of me. Once, they were the end of someone I held very dear to me. Miranda had paid the price for my burgeoning, adaptive power.
“Violet!”
I looked at Brynna and James. Penny was still in James's arms, crying into his neck, her tiny body trembling in fear. It had been Brynna who had shouted.
“Take Penny back to mine and James's room. Lock the door. Do not let anyone in unless it is Alice, Quinn, or Elijah.”
“Why do I have to lock the door?” 
James handed Penny to me.
Brynna watched as a man went running by, shouting to Don that it was time to go to war. She looked back at me, raised an eyebrow, and pursed her lips.
“Right.” I replied, “Be quick, you two. Okay?”
She nodded. Then she did something she hadn't done in almost five years. She grasped my face and pressed her lips to my forehead. I was stunned and moved so deeply by the gesture that tears rushed into my eyes by their own will. She nodded to me again, and I hurried off with Penny, looking over my shoulder just before I rounded the corner.
The people of our house were stomping and shouting like hungry animals in a deadly herd. A stampede would soon be heading into the north after the Bachums. Their attack on us had proven that they were ready to fight until they erased us from existence. Now, we had to show that we desired the very same course of action.
In the eyes of both Brynna and James, I saw that they understood that terrible truth as well as I did, if not better. They were ready to fight. They wanted nothing more than to live the peaceful life they had promised Penny and me, but they knew that wasn't an option now.
The darkness was closing in.

Brynna

“I am going to speak with the boy from the cave. His father and I do not see eye-to-eye.”
I stared at Adam, wondering why he was justifying his actions only to me. I did not care about the war he wished to start, nor did I care about the one that had raged for years before our arrival on the planet. I looked up when dust fell from the ceiling; the people with whom we had been living were no better than animals. They were running through the house, gathering any blunt instruments that could be used as weapons. Their rage knew no bounds.
I understood that completely. It had been a truce made behind closed doors: The Bachums would not set foot on our land. We would abide by the same courtesy. The bodies in the trees had simply been a final warning. I could not justify such senseless violence, but I did understand, if only somewhat.
“I do not wish for you to see me speak to him.”
“Why is that, Adam?” I asked with my arms crossed over my chest.
“Because I know that you already think very little of me.”
I was confused, a state of being that was as alien to me as the man I was looking at.
“And the feelings of an Earthean woman are important to you?”
There was a trace of a smile on his lips.
“Only yours, my dear Brynna.”
“Why is that?”
Now, he was openly smiling.
“Another time.”
He turned and sauntered away. The torches flickered as he passed, cowering in his growing ire. I returned to James who had been watching my conversation with Adam closely.
“He does not want me to watch him interrogate the boy from the cave.”
“Why?” James asked.
“Well, it certainly does not matter. Don wants us to interrogate the other boy. I do not believe that Adam will harm Jonathon. He is the other leader's son. He is much too important to be dispatched so quickly.”
“He is. I think you're right. I hope so, at least.” He turned his gaze to me. “I'm starting to think we were wrong.”
“Wrong in the side we chose, or wrong in our capture of Jonathon?”
“Both. But in regards to the former, we certainly weren't going to go sing to the heavens with the Bachums.”
“Definitely not.” I chuckled, “Or be forced into a loveless marriage where we had to bear ten children.”
“I can't say I wouldn't enjoy that.”
“Oh, no?”
“Nope.”
We laughed only slightly. I kissed him and buried my face in his neck.
“You are no longer a canine. You are officially swine.”
I felt his warm breath on my neck when he laughed now.
“I know. I'm a sick man.”
“No.” I shook my head and looked up at him. “James, I don't want to do this.”
“I know.” My inner storm was calmed for the duration of time that his lips were on mine. “I don't want you to do this, either. Just wait out here for me, okay? Anything that you could gather from him with your power, I can easily gather with mine. Maybe you can convince Adam to leave Jonathon alone. He seems to value your opinion.”
I shook my head.
“No. I won't leave you to face doing this alone. And Adam will not listen; his fury was too great.”
“So, he'll kill him? Could you see that?” James asked me, somewhat more intensely than I expected. “We'll never be able to right this, if he does. It will be our fault if he dies. He's a kid. He's probably Violet's age.”
I nodded and stood on my tiptoes to rest my forehead against his. In a trembling voice, I whispered:
“We made a terrible mistake.”
Those words were weighted with such stinging regret, with such terrifying implications. If that boy died, it would be our fault. We had acted rashly, thinking that he would be able to offer some useful information to us. We had thought that handing him over to Adam would be easy; we had thought that it would guarantee our safety. Yet there we were, still stuck on the front-lines of the storm that was coming to pass.
“Don wants him alive. He wants them both alive. We have no choice but to do this.” My eyes met his again. “With what we were talking about earlier...”
“About our two choices?”
“Indeed. What about in regards to the latter?”
He was quiet for a long moment. That pause was enough of an answer but still, he spoke.
“You're right. That was a mistake. We could have left. It was egotistical of me to take him...”
“You? Egotistical? No.” I smiled up at him.
“A cliché about rocks and glass houses comes to mind, my dear.” He told me calmly, “I thought it was a smart move. But now, I feel guilty about it. Do you feel guilty about it?”
“Of course I do. He is very young, like you said. He looks that way, anyway. Now, if he dies, his blood is on our hands.”
“You know what that means, don't you?”
“I am sure I do.”
He raised his eyebrow at me, calling me silently on my own ego once again. I grinned at him innocently.
“We need to rectify the error.”
“By breaking him out of here?” I asked, stunned.
“Imagine that, you didn't know what it meant. We need to try to convince Adam to let him go first. If that doesn't work, then yes. We need to let him go ourselves.”
I nodded in response.
“I agree.”
We were stalling out of fear of admitting exactly what we had been asked to do. We were meant to interrogate the boy from the Bachum camp; we were meant to get answers through whatever means were necessary. Were our hearts truly cold enough to commit such an act?
“Remember that they killed three of our people.” James told me. “We were completely outnumbered and outgunned. We're lucky to still be here. To still be alive, I mean.”
“Is that how you're justifying this?”
“Yes.” He answered, and I nodded again.
The boy was handcuffed to a chair. He had been observing the underground cell he was in, but when James and I entered, he looked at us; I saw distinct, unshakeable fear in his eyes. I watched as he took a deep breath, knowing he was trying to steady his nerves. My own rattled loudly, urging me to turn back. I had always been cold, but I had never physically harmed a defenseless human being. Yes, I had killed to defend myself and my siblings. But I had never hurt one who had no chance, as was the case with this handcuffed boy. I did not know many who were capable of such brutality. James was right in saying that they had unjustly attacked us. But if we had the guns, would we not have followed a similar course of action?
James and I sat down in front of him in the wicker chairs that Don had left. As we studied him, he only glanced up once or twice.
“Freaks...” He muttered, but his voice was trembling so severely when he said it that I could not take offense. I looked at James, sensing the same reluctance in him to move forward with the questioning. He was meant to utilize his great strength to cause pain. I was meant to enter this boy's mind to ferret out what we needed to know. I took no joy in trespassing into the thoughts of another. My own stream of consciousness ran deep, powerfully consuming any silence that might have surfaced from its depths. I did not need to dive into the endless stream belonging to another person.
“Tell me about yourself.”
It was the only point from which to jump off. He looked at me now, and behind the fear in his eyes, I saw great defiance.
“Your name is Christian.”
“How do you...”
I touched my forehead.
“I can read your mind. I do not wish to do that, as it can sometimes be very painful.”
“Painful for you, or painful for me?” He asked softly.
“For both of us.” I answered, “My boyfriend here,” He was understandably shocked to learn that James and I were a couple, “He is very, very strong. Any answers that we need desperately will be retrieved, either through my ability to read your heart and mind or through brute force. I do not wish to use either method. I would much prefer talking civilly.”
“Are you two Don's lapdogs? Are you his muscle?” He asked in a voice of condescension that required more bravery than he actually felt.
“No. We are unappreciative of your attack on us. Three of our number were killed. They stood very little chance against your guns.”
“And we stand very little chance against your powers, or whatever you call them.”
“By powers, do you mean the two I have just described?” I asked.
“What the fuck do you think I mean?!” He bellowed at me, and I will admit, I jumped slightly.
“Hey!” James lunged forward and grabbed the front of Christian's shirt. The young boy looked up at him, into his blazing red eyes, and his terror could not be masked anymore. He stammered out a few indiscernible words as he heaved back and forth in his chair with each tight breath he struggled to draw in.
“James...” I stood up, grasped his hands, and pulled him away from the boy. Very gently, I sat him back down in his chair.
“I highly suggest you watch your mouth, you understand me?”
Now that the threat of immediate bodily harm had dissipated, the boy was beginning to regain some of his earlier steel. His eyes narrowed as he looked between the two of us, clearly trying to determine what we were going to ask him next. To keep him from straining himself in his attempts to guess my question, I asked one.
“What do they tell you about what's happening to us here?”
After barely a pause, he answered.
“They're calling it 'Satan's Gift' where I'm from.”
“What else do they say?” I asked.
“They say that you all have aligned with the devils that roam this land.”
“The city-dwelling natives, you mean.”
“The man who attacked our campsite is who I mean.”
“Well, I would like to reassure you, for your own mind, that we were evolving for days before we came here. In some cases, people had been evolving for weeks.” I explained, “You all would, too, if you just...”
“We don't want to evolve!” The boy exclaimed hysterically. His eyes were ablaze with self-righteous anger. “We are humans, created in God's image! We will stay the same, because it's what God intended!”
Oh, we had us a devout believer. This was bound to be interesting...
“The only reason why we're even still alive is because God wants us to be. You all take these powers and allow this 'evolution,' as you call it, to happen. We will never do that.”
“No one is asking you to.” James snapped at him.
“That's what the man who attacked the campsite said. He told us we had to accept the change or we'd all die. We'd rather die than be freaks like you! It's wrong! It's...” He stammered for a moment in his fury before settling on an appropriate adjective that would make his point strongly, “It's unnatural.”
I countered his best effort easily.
“Actually, my dear, it is the most natural thing in the world. Our changes happened through no pact with the devil nor through any requests of our own. They just happened.”
“You're lying! You aligned yourself with him! He gave you these powers. If you're with him, then you're against God!”
“Listen, we are not fans of Adam, either. But as far as we know, your leaders are not the most Godly of people, either. You have aligned with the other natives, haven't you? The ones from the cave?” I inquired, only to be met with quiet on his end. “Come on, Christian, you were so eager to talk only a moment ago. I was enjoying our conversation. Let us continue it nicely.”
The silence continued.
“Don't make me hit you.” James warned him airily.
Still, he did not speak. James stood up quickly and grabbed the front of his shirt again.
“Yes! Yes!” Christian exclaimed, “They believe in the same things we believe! They don't have any powers! They can fight, but that's it! They don't follow what the other man says!”
“See? Was that so hard?” James asked calmly as he sat back down.
The boy was trembling and trying to decide between James and me whose power could cause the most pain. I gave him just a short minute to gather himself together before asking my next question.
“What goes on in your camp? Is it as uptight as we have heard?”
“No. There is nothing wrong with the way we live our lives.”
“Tell me about it.” I put my head on my hand and observed him closely.
“We pray a lot. We pray for good fortune and for victory against all of you.” On the last part, he grimaced in disgust. “I'm not going to apologize for having faith. If that's what you want from me, don't hold your breath! I'll never renounce God or Mary and Rich!”
Interesting!
“We want to know about your way of life up there. That is all.” I assured him. I even held up my hands to signal surrender.
“We live the way we're supposed to live. The Bachums protect us, because God protects them.”
“That's what they say?” James raised a skeptical eyebrow, “Seriously?”
“It's true! Your ability to fight didn't save your people, did it? They've been touched by God. That's the only reason why more of our people survived.”
“Sure.” James replied, “You must be their most pious follower. I'm sure not everyone feels as strongly about this nonsense as you do.”
“Believe me, they do!” The boy snapped indignantly, “We know that we're living the right way.”
“You believe that you can decide what the right way to live is?” James's anger was growing again.
“No, your master decided that! He decided that the way you freaks live is right when he said that only one of our sides will walk out of this!”
“You are referring to the war for our place here?”
“What else would I be referring to?! God, they said that you're so smart! You ask the stupidest questions!” He shouted at me again. “Just like a woman, isn't it?! Just like a c...”
His foul word was cut off just after the first sound of it could alert us to what he was about to say. Every muscle in my body had tensed in preparation for it, and my eyes had shut by their own accord. When I opened them, I discovered that James had grabbed him again.
“I dare you.” He snarled at him, “I dare you to say it. I dare you to call her that!”
“Look at you. Her big protector. You're going to die defending her. No bitch is worth that. I have a wife that they gave me.”
I had gently sat James back down in his seat.
“If it came down between me and her, I'd hold her in front of me just so I could run away. I'm not ashamed of that, and I don't have to be. No bitch is worth my life.”
“What a big man you are, Christian.” I hissed in dangerous, venomous rage. “God or Gods, you are no older than my younger sister, and you have been forced to get married. You have been convinced that you are allowed to speak and feel this way about women. Do you have a mother, Christian? Do you have sisters?”
“No. My mother is dead. It's just me and my wife now.”
“Well, I weep for her, believe me.” I continued.
“Yeah, that's just like a bitch, too. Weeping, I mean. I make mine weep everyday...”
“You need to drop those people, and come to the right side.” James told him before turning to me, “Shit, even Adam is better than what he is dealing with, baby.”
“We'll never bow down to that disgusting man the way you all have! We'll always stay true to our God. It will be you that is smited in fire!”
“Is smited a word?” James asked me, simply to aggravate Christian. I could not suppress a small smirk now that such intense dislike for that boy had grown inside of me.
“The world has already been 'smited.'” I told Christian sarcastically, “Rather, it was smote. Whatever the correct grammatical usage of the term, our world is gone, destroyed by man, I’m afraid. Not God.”
“No. It was God's reckoning, and it will follow us here! You all think you're safe. You think with your powers, you are out of His reach. He will destroy you for aligning with that man! He will cast you into the deepest layer of hell!”
“Desperation and fear yield such interesting results.” I mused out loud incredulously, “Were you this devout on earth?”
“No,” He growled, “I was bad. I was selfish and evil. I stole from people and hurt my family. I went to jail twice. The Bachums have made me see how wrong I was. I have received my lashings and been born again.”
“Lashings?” James and I asked, in equal shock.
“We have all paid the price for what we did on Earth. We are as pure as the Lamb now.”
“I sincerely doubt that.” I rolled my eyes. He lunged forward.
“Stupid girl! You think you know everything! You think you know what you're doing! You think you've got a handle on everything, don't you?!”
“That was very repetitive...”
“Where I'm from, you wouldn't even be allowed to speak!”
“So, would you call your camp a patriarchal society?” I asked calmly. My cavalier apathy to his anger only fanned the flames.
“Women do what they're told. That's how it should have been on Earth. That is in the good Book. Women are submissive to their husbands.”
“Gross...” I whispered, making a face to convey my disgust. I looked over at James. “Honey, do you want me to be submissive to you?”
“No. How very boring that would be.” James replied with his head rested against his hand.
“You can poke fun at us. You can chide us for what we believe. But we're right. There will come a time when you all are grasping for the holy light, and it will go dark on you! God will not pull you from the black abyss and...”
“This is insanity.” James cut him off mid-sentence and addressed me, “Those people up there will end up killing themselves before we even get the chance.” He turned back to the boy, “I guarantee you, my spunky friend, that there are plenty of people who can still think for themselves just waiting to overthrow your beloved leaders. You need to prepare for that. You'll find that once they're out of the way, you'll be much better off. Which brings me to my next question: Besides guns, exactly what defenses do you have?”
“Why would I tell you that? Why would I help you?”
“Wouldn't you like to live?” James asked calmly.
“James, we cannot punish him for what he believes. I am not angered by the things he said. I am profoundly stunned that people would go along with such stupidity but then, I do understand. They were afraid for their lives. They turned to those who offered them safety in return for blind allegiance. They need to believe in all of this divine protection nonsense in order to sleep at night.”
“I don't need your defense.” The boy shot at me suddenly.
“Darling, I was not defending you. I was simply explaining your delusional ramblings out loud to myself.”
“Your father believes. At least someone in your family of trash believes. I pity him. He tried to lead us but failed. The reason why he failed is because through his seed, he bore children of Satan. That's what Rich told him when he got his lashings.”
“My father got lashings?” I pretended to be overjoyed at the idea. Secretly, I was; I never imagined that he would ever suffer physical pain at another's hands the way that he had forced me to suffer and now, I was learning that he had. It was petty and childish to feel that way but then, I could not question the giddy feeling that rose inside of me as I thought of it.
“How could he possibly have known, though, that you all would turn out to be such freaks?” Christian continued as though I had not spoken, “I feel bad for him.”
“You shouldn't. If you'd like to talk about evil and hell, then know this: That man will have a throne right next to the beast you believe has claimed us. If there were a hell, that is.”
“He has relented. He has received great punishment for his evil ways. That red-headed woman with him received worse. And your mother, if she were here, would have learned her place very quickly. She would have received the absolute worst of it.”
“Well, thank God she didn't make the trip.” James replied, and the tone of his voice provoked a laugh in me.
“You think I don't know who you are?” The boy shot at me. He was desperately trying to needle me into an emotional meltdown. I merely smiled at him and tried not to giggle at his display of what was essentially an overcharged, religion-themed show of team spirit.
“I know all about your life on Earth. So, let me ask you this,” He grinned in sadistic glee,
“Did what happened with your father's best friend turn you on to older men? Is that why you're with him?”
Consider me needled.
Any time that event was brought up, I immediately felt a surge of bile skyrocketing from my stomach into my throat. I had to stop myself from lurching forward. I had to stop myself from grasping my head as dizziness shredded my brain to string that blew in some cranial breeze. The challenge of stopping all of those bodily reactions to the reawakened trauma blinded me to James's ascent from his seat. I had no time to stop him. By the time I had recomposed myself enough to see clearly, he had lunged forward over the table and tackled Christian backwards.
“James!” I stood up, but it was too late. He was pounding his fists into the boy's face, mumbling obscenities in that animal rage we were slowly becoming accustomed to experiencing. When the screech that preceded sure bloodshed escaped his throat, I hurtled over the fallen table and grabbed a hold of him.
I possessed not a fraction of his strength. Though I was capable of fighting to near-death and winning with ease, I could not match the pure force of James's newly evolved strength. Pulling with all my might only pained me. He jerked forward and ripped into the boy's neck.
The scream that filled the room was short-lived, followed by a gurgling sound that forced me to turn away. I closed my eyes, grasping the leg of the overturned table; it was the only thing close that I could use to steady myself. I listened as James's heavy breaths were drawn in and released, waiting for the loud expulsion of murderous fury. Sure enough, a moment later, he roared, and the force of the sound extinguished the torches, leaving us in darkness.
“Is he dead?” I asked the black room.
“I lost control.”
“That's not what I asked.”
A long moment of silence followed my statement. I looked up, my eyes adjusting to the darkness, enabling me to see clearly. James was knelt over the boy's twitching body, checking for a pulse.
“He's gone.”
“That certainly was not what Don had in mind when he asked us to use our powers to gain answers.” I was lighting the torches back up with my lighter.
“Well, I don't care what Don thinks. Were you not listening?! Did you not hear the things he was saying?”
“I heard them. His insults were directed entirely at me. You had no reason to kill him. I understand that you feel it was for my sake...”
James turned and stormed out of the room.
“Get out of my way!” He shouted at Don as he passed.
“What happened?” Don asked me as I hurried past him after James.
“He lost control.” I repeated James's earlier words; it was the only choice explanation for what had just occurred.
“Is he dead?” Don demanded, “Did you even find out what I asked you to find out?”
“He was never going to tell us what their defenses were.”
“Why did James kill him? What did he do?”
“He made some personal slights against me. We found out about their way of life, but that's...
“Their way of life?!” Don repeated in incredulous anger, “What good will that do us? Knowing about their way of life isn't going to...”
“I am sick of being yelled at by weak-minded men.” I snapped, both in conversation and in feeling.
With that, I pushed past him. As I walked past, a door swung open beside me. Adam walked out calmly, wiping blood from his mouth and licking his fangs. I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by that man whose swagger and charisma never failed him, not even after he had just taken a life.
“Your interrogation ended on a very similar high note, did it not? Oh, the look on young Jonathon's face when he saw that it was none other than me coming to question him...” He smiled evilly and leaned against the wall.
I groaned in disgust loudly before storming away. Now, I felt guilty not only over the death of the devout boy but over Jonathon, too. I should have gone with my instincts. The decision to live at Don's commune was wrong. Sure, we had been happy. We had felt secure, however briefly. But now, we were going to be forced to fight. I had two sisters who were my sole responsibility. I had a brother who, despite his temper, was also mine to look after, and I had a boyfriend whose rage, once unleashed, yielded terrible results. I pondered momentarily the childlike hope I had allowed to set in not only when we landed on Pangaea but also when we moved into Don's house. Now, I knew it had all been a dream. Dreams so often turn to nightmares before the person asleep can stop the harsh and sudden change. I understood that now.
Don's hand wrapped around my wrist. I almost gasped in pain when his grip tightened. When he spun me around to face him, I saw the beast for the second time that evening but this time, the madness was even more intense. Don Abba was suddenly appearing to me in his truest form; he was a monster who thrived on chaos and catastrophe. With that crazed energy, he could command his subjects to do his brutal bidding, and they would not ask questions. They would go along with his plans out of fear, but also by their own will. He would make them believe their rampage was justified, in need of being carried out to protect their freedom. It would be all too easy for him.
“He will pay a great price for what he has done, and you should, too! You were there! You're an accomplice!” He pushed me against the wall hard. I commanded myself not to grimace in pain, and my body obeyed. I even managed a smile of aggravated disbelief.
“Don't you smirk at me!” He punched the wall right next to my face. I jumped only slightly.
“Get your hands off of me.” I ordered calmly, my smile growing with my dangerously insidious fury. Both then and now, I knew and know, respectively, that if that man had not released his grip on me in ten seconds, I would have destroyed him. I would have torn the limbs from his body and stomped on the remains until there was nothing left but a pool of blood and some shredded skin. In doing that, I would have shown him never to accost me so aggressively while simultaneously doing the world a favor by erasing him from it.
“I asked one simple thing of you! I needed to know what their defenses were! Now, we're going in blind! You can thank yourself when I send your brother in first! He'll be the first to die.”
Now, I grabbed him. I pushed him backwards, my long, pointed fangs shooting out. I held him against the wall and hissed in his face.
“I am your leader! Let go of me now!”
“You will not touch any of the people I love, Don Abba! If you want to die, then make your move! You will be dead before you can take two steps towards them! You do not want me as your enemy!” He struggled against my grip and I locked my hands on him even more tightly. He did grimace in pain and was unable to stifle a gasp.
“I carry at least a little of every power. So tell me,” I squeezed him harder, feeling my fingernails ready to rip into his skin. He yelled out in pain, “Does this hurt? Would you like me to utilize them all at once? That is coming next!”
“Let go! Let go!” Don begged as he tried to pry my fingers from his skin before my nails pushed through.
“I will let go if you shut up and listen!”
For the first time, I was in control of the situation. For the first time, I was going to lead the way. I remembered how helpless and hopeless I had felt for so many years. All of that suffering, all of that self-loathing... They were being rectified right then. I was going to handle the situation with the Bachums myself. I was going to end the war and win our freedom. Don would be nothing but a fly buzzing in my ear. I could not deny that he was valuable; I needed any able-bodied men and women who were able to fight. Additionally, Don had the rage and power I needed to convince others to join us. He had the ability to cause great destruction with the power he had mastered. I did need him.
“We are going north. We are going to take down the Bachums. We need only one strike.”
“They have all the guns! They have all the weapons your father brought!”
“Well, then, we had better learn to duck and cover.” I replied with a small grin.
Adam chuckled. I scowled at him before turning my attention back to Don.
“Your people are angry, Don. We have lived our lives in peace, giving without a fight what you have deemed is a fair share. But people do not believe it is all that fair. Adam, how much food does he supply you with?”
“I don't give him that m...”
“Very much.” Adam answered cheerfully, “Far more than I need. His offerings are to appease me, which I am sure you already know, given your brilliance.”
I wanted to remind him that flattery would get him nowhere, but I knew that it was not the time, at least not yet.
“Adam!” Don protested the spilling of that secret.
“Exactly. Your people are angry, Don, but it is alright.” I let go of him, “You are going to absolve their anger and fear right now. You are going to go up there and tell them that we are going to war. You are going to tell them that it has been brought to your attention that they are unhappy with the share they have had to contribute. You will tell them that when we return from this fight with the Bachums, revisions will be made. Adam, you will stop exploiting our hard work.”
“I would hardly say that I am exploiting your hard work. I am simply accepting what I am being given. I am simply...”
“Thank you so much. I am glad we agree.” I cut him off and beamed brightly at him. I expected to see the beast in him emerge right there in front of me. Something told me he did not appreciate being mouthed off to. He was the leader of his people, for the sake of all deities and Gods. He was the king of an evolved, superior race. Surely he would not take any orders from a lowly, almost fully-evolved human. But he smiled slightly and leaned against the wall again to observe the scene before him.
“Did you expect anger at your insolence?” He asked me as he wiped the blood from his hands onto a towel I had not noticed he was holding.
“I did, indeed.”
“I know I did!” Don interjected furiously.
“I find it very fascinating, as boggling as the rest of you, Ms. Olivier. I find it quite enjoyable.”
My face betrayed my confusion and surprise. His smile widened.
“I like a woman with feeling.”
“As opposed to a corpse? What are you even talking about right now?
“Think about it.
“Anyway,” I ignored Adam and looked back at Don, “Do you understand what I have said? Do you understand my reasoning?”
“I suppose.” He smirked at me, “Remind me to put in my will that if I should die, you may take my place.”
I smirked back.
“How much do you want to bet people would like me more?”
“You're so clever.” He replied irritably.
“Yes. I am.”
“Children, shall we adjourn to the front porch?”
“Indeed, Adam. Let us adjourn.” I strode ahead of the two men, thinking that their current state of minds were polar opposites. Don was seething, believing that I was trying to steal his almighty throne. He loathed that I had used such force on him. He felt like less of a man. Well, that certainly had taken very little to accomplish.
Adam, on the other hand, was bouncing in light, airy good-humor on the inside. The feeling of bewildered joy filled me up, reminding me of spring rain, the light in James's eyes, Penny's lighthearted, girlish giggle, and oddly enough, the smell of Maura's perfume. At the end of that stream of vividly beautiful, sedating memories, I saw the moment when I had first seen Adam. I threw myself backwards out of the thoughts, my heart pounding with the same potent fear I had felt that night. I blinked several times, chancing a glance back at him. I jumped slightly to find that he was just behind me.
Why had I felt such sublime sedation upon seeing his face? Why had my heart soared so brilliantly?
His pale white hand grazed my back just once, sending shivers down my spine that neither repulsed nor scintillated me. He leaned forward, pressed his smooth lips to my ear, and whispered in a tone of malicious seduction:
“Well, isn't that interesting?”
***

“It has been brought to my attention that you all are not happy with the provisions that have been made.”
There was a noticeable shift in the tension that had been bounding through the crowd already. Those with whom we lived were now afraid of Don's wrath. Earlier, they had only been ready for the fight with the Bachums.
“It's alright,” Don held his hands up and closed his eyes for one dramatic moment, “I understand. If you may allow me to be candid for a minute, I will tell you that I need all of you. Because of that, your happiness is very important to me. When we return, revisions will be made.” Don's eyes found me in the crowd. He scowled for but one quick second. I smiled in satisfaction at him before he looked away.
“We are walking now into what might very well be the first and only fight with the Bachums. Adam has given us an advantage, though I cannot lie to all of you and say that this will be easy. We are going to have a hell of a time trying to take them all down. They have guns, grenades, and other weapons that Daniel Olivier made sure were on board. The Bachums have also aligned with the other natives.”
There was a gasp in the crowd and a sudden rustle of whispers.
“Nobody worry. They have not accepted their evolution. We have. We are stronger and faster. We're able to fight until the last breath with ease and precision. We have nothing to fear once we can get past the guns. Now, let me make this very clear...”
A change was coming over him. It was as sudden as the appearance of James at my side. The latter avoided my eyes when he grasped my hand. I stifled the urge to inquire where he had been.
The former raised his voice several octaves to an authoritative thunder. His eyes bugged and the desire for bloodshed that was already being whispered about in our group hit a crescendo in the face of his self-righteous energy.
“We are most like the natives who were already here! We are the ones who are supposed to live! Those people believe that they are above us! They believe that we have shunned God, and maybe we have. But we need to prove to them that they are not protected. We need to show them the wrath of red anarchy!”
“That's right!” A man behind me yelled.
“Bring them down!” A woman shrieked in the back of the group.
“They believe that we have aligned with the devil! They believe, in all their self-righteous Bible verse-spewing nonsense, that we are evil and undeserving of life! Well, we are going to show them that though they may follow their laws and beg for safety from God, we are unstoppable. We are not going to be swayed by fear! We are going to take our rightful place in this land!”
“YEAH!” Several men behind us yelled before throwing their fists into the air. I looked back at them in aggravation; they had startled me, and I did not appreciate it.
“They shot our people! They shot Angie, taking her away from her husband...” He beckoned to Angie's husband in the crowd, whose murderous need for revenge was justified. “…and their four children! He took Frank, who was loved greatly by his wife, by all of us! He was the first volunteer for the security detail! They took Perry, Hiroshi, Abdul, John, and Katie! They took our brothers and sisters!”
“KILL THEM!” A man in the back shouted. Roars of assent followed his bloodthirsty cry. Oh, the pot was bubbling now. Even I was beginning to mentally prepare for war. Even I was ready to make them suffer for those they had taken. Our house consisted of many people, all of whom had become close. One family's loss was everyone's loss. It was time to inflict the same pain on those in the Bachum camp. It was time to show them who truly was the superior race.
“They followed them through the gates of our home and would have killed us all, had our other brave family members not stopped them!” He beckoned to those of us who had dispatched the insurgency.
“They will know how seriously we take that offense. They call us freaks! They call us traitors to our kind! They say our powers make us unworthy of happiness! But we will show them today that they are the traitors! They are the ones unworthy of life! We will never let the Bachums forget that when you take from us, we take ten times more from you. Now, I ask you: Who will join me?!”
The explosion of noise was immediate. The men and women surrounding us were roaring their commitment to the cause. If James, Elijah, and I were fans of such pious shows of faith, we would have roared, too. We would have thrust our fists into the air to show our allegiance. The three of us certainly felt the same fury and were ready to inflict the same violence, though we would not show it. We stared straight ahead, our eyes burning brighter than the torches that lit the scene.
The time had finally come to stake our claim on this land.
***

“Keep Penny close.”
“Why?”
Violet was becoming more like me every day. Every command had to be questioned; even the most simple of instructions required detailed explanation.
“These people are not themselves. They are angry and itching for violence. They want to exact revenge on those responsible. No rash action is unjustified.”
“I don't think that they would hurt Penny and me, Brynn. We haven't done anything to them.”
“We are our father's children. Being his is plenty. We should be back by night tomorrow. Until then, stay up here. I have left plenty of food in your room.”
“You stole food?!” Violet whispered in terror, “Brynn, do you have any idea what Don will do if he...”
“He is not going to find out. He is coming with us.”
“I don't like this.” She said in a shaking voice, “This is bad. You're right, no one is acting like themselves. They're acting insane.”
“They are insane. Losing seven of our number had its desired effect. However, I sincerely doubt that the Bachums are aware that we are coming so soon. It is best to strike them when they are reveling in their victory.”
“Just be so careful!” She hugged me tightly.
I wanted to pull away. Then, my hands moved up by their own will and smoothed the back of her soft hair. I closed my eyes, enjoying that moment of sisterly love. It had been so long since I had allowed myself to be embraced by her. I had left her so quickly upon realizing that she was old enough to stand on her own. I wanted to apologize for my coldness; I never should have put such distance between us. My pride was still too strong. Any apology that I wished to be heard was stifled by my belief that I was always right.
I pulled away and rested my hand on her face.
“I never wished for you to see such awful brutality.”
“I know.” She reached up to swipe at her tearing eyes.
“I have never wanted to kill anyone. But those people attacked us unfairly. They killed seven of our people. I might not be Don's biggest fan, but I do feel great fondness for those we live with. I feel their pain, and some have lost their family tonight. I cannot imagine.”
“I know. You don't have to explain yourself to me. If you'd let me, I'd go with you.”
“I'd sooner let you die before me. Though honestly, the two circumstances are synonymous. If you were to accompany me into the north, you would more than likely die before I could save you. I cannot afford to have one eye on the battle and one on you. Do you understand?”
“I guess.” She crossed her arms. Any body language expert would say that the gesture was evidence of her feeling anything but understanding. I smiled slightly; she was so headstrong and so set in her beliefs. She could fight perfectly well, and yet I was sticking her on the sidelines. No amount of time that she stood with her arms crossed or her lips pursed in irritation would change my mind, however. She was not going to come with James, Elijah, and me to fight the Bachums. I would not lose her in that bloody struggle.
“Remember what I said. I will see you tomorrow night.”
I looked at her for one quiet moment of remembrance. If that was the last time I would see my sister, I wanted to etch every detail of her young, beautiful face into my memory. If I was going to die that night, I needed the comfort of familiarity; I needed my sisters' faces in my mind to remind me why I had lost my life. I would gladly die fighting for them. I shuddered to think of them facing that hostile world alone, without my guidance or tough love. I turned away from her, forcing those breathtakingly fearful thoughts from my mind.
“Brynn?”
“Yes?” I asked without turning around.
“I love you.”
I smiled slightly and turned to her, acknowledging mentally that whatever strife had been between us had dissipated.
“I love you too, Violet.” I was surprised that I had no urge to vomit upon saying such heavy words. Something was changing in me. Some softness I more than likely could not afford was beginning to set in.
She deserves your kindness, I reminded myself, Here of late, you have taken far more than you have given.
“No tears, ma'am. Keep it tough.” I ordered her, but my own throat had clenched. A renegade tear more headstrong than my will to suppress all feeling streamed down my face. I wiped it away and observed the drop on my hand as though it was a newly discovered species. My heart jumped in surprise and cowered in disgust at the sight simultaneously. Mainly, I was fascinated.
“Look at that. Real tears.” Violet told me, and when I looked up at her, she had many streaming down her face. She rushed to me and threw her arms around my neck. Though I allowed no more of my own tears to fall, I did hold onto her tightly, feeling that ever-present darkness rearing its head at us and bearing its fangs. It was poised to strike and hissing evilly in a final warning.
I walked away from Violet knowing something terrible was on the horizon. Whatever strength I had on Pangaea was going to fail me soon enough. My world was going to be rocked and squeezed in the iron fist of someone's rage. As I kissed Violet's head and left her there to tend to Penny, I swore to fight the impending event until my very last breath. When I returned, I would keep them in my sight. I would keep them next to me, destroying any harm, tangible or otherwise, that hunted them.
I should not have walked away.
***

James and I walked in silence, side by side. I could sense his exasperation with me. We had come so far together; for once in his life, he was committed to one woman. For the first time in my life, I was in love with a man. Not only was I in love, but I was in love passionately. That love ran far deeper than I could possibly gauge. But the events in the world were pushing and pulling us together and apart. I could not deny that awful truth.
“Say something.” I urged him quietly.
“I don't have anything to say.”
“Tell me why you are angry. I know how much you love doing that.”
He ignored me, opting to stare ahead instead of providing me with a straightforward answer. I looked over to see that the torch light was once again casting a shadow over his eyes. It perfectly complimented his present emotional state of anger and unease. Just for a moment, I allowed myself to push into his thoughts.
Regret. There was so much tortured guilt. He had killed a young boy. Though he was still furious at the things the boy had said, he wished that he had been able to control himself. Why couldn't he control himself anymore? I made him so angry sometimes. What if he hurt me even when he was in his right state of mind?
I grasped his hand and pulled him away from the group.
“Believe me when I say that every time you've walked in front of me, I've been checking you out because those pants look awesome.” He told me quickly, “I'd like nothing more than to rip them off of you. But now isn't exactly the best time, my dear.”
“Shut up!” I whispered gently.
I placed both of my hands on his face and stood on my tiptoes to kiss him. I slid my tongue into his mouth and shivered delightfully when I felt his moving against mine.
“Well, if you insist...” He said in between my kisses.
But then, just as he was beginning to ready himself for another passionate round of animal love-making, he pulled away. There was torment in his eyes as he ran his hand over his head and looked away from me.
“I think we need to stop seeing each other for a while.”
Now, ordinarily, I would have immediately gone on the defensive. But luckily, I had trespassed into his thoughts for that one second. I had felt the tortured pain in his heart. I had felt his nauseating fear that I would one day be on the receiving end of his rage.
“Really?” I asked him after crossing my arms over my chest and turning my head on the side as I observed him. He had become used to that stance; I used it when I was displeased with something he had said.
“Don't stand like that.” He warned me breathlessly as his gaze scorched into my own, “You know what that does to me.”
For some reason, the stance that showed my discontent provoked a heightened state of arousal in him. I wondered briefly what that said about our relationship. Realizing that it meant nothing, I returned to the topic at hand.
“You would never hurt me. So, stop worrying.”
“What are you...” He stopped and raised an eyebrow at me. Now he was the one who was displeased. “Really?! Brynna, I know we haven't exactly had a chance to talk about this, what with this ridiculous war going on, but we really have to set up some boundaries with your new ability.”
“Why? I happen to know that given how I baffle you so frustratingly, if the situation were reversed, you would be in my mind constantly, trying to figure me out.”
“Yeah, but that's because...” He stopped upon viewing the look on my face, “Alright, I just led myself into a black hole. Resurfacing...” He shook his head back and forth quickly to clear and reroute his mind to the current topic of discussion.
I walked ahead of him, keeping the torches of the others in my sight.
“Do you love me, James?”
“What?”
“It is a difficult question, I know. Surely, loving me is very difficult. You deserve a medal.”
“It isn't difficult, baby. You're difficult, yes. But that makes me love you more, I think. Yes, I love you. There's the answer to your difficult question: I love you. Don't ask me how it happened so quickly, because I wouldn't be able to tell you.”
“I chalk it up to our animal nature.”
“I chalk it up to how hot you look in those pants.”
I turned back to him and beamed.
“Wow, James; you really know how to make a girl go weak in the knees. I would have mistaken you for a boy my own age when you said that.”
“Hey, you throw some tight jeans into the equation, and every man becomes a drooling, overly hormonal twenty-two year old. Not twenty-two even; more like sixteen.”
“I do not know about jeans being the surest way, especially tight jeans. I mean, what if my behind were very misshapen, or had a tail, or something?”
“Oh, my God!” He groaned before wrapping his arms around me from behind. He pressed his lips to my neck, right on the spot that always sent a burning, sensuous prickle down my spine. “You drive me insane! Why the hell would you have a tail?”
“Well, we are far more animalistic now than we were on Earth. A tail might be right around the corner, and you will have to deal with it.”
He laughed, and I looked back at him; my smile grew upon seeing the light returning to his eyes.
“Well, this is proof that we've come a long way, my dear.” I smiled as he kissed me gently.
“What is?”
“If anyone would have threatened to end a relationship with me...”
“You would have knee-capped them?” James asked, “Should I be worried?”
“No!” I replied through my laughter. “I would have ended it first. I would not have waited for any reasoning. I would have been gone before my pride could be too badly shaken.”
“And then you would have knee-capped them?”
I punched him lightly in the chest several times. He let me land a few before he picked me up and held me against a tree. His mouth claimed mine as my legs wrapped around him, and my hands grasped either side of his neck.
“This is the last thing that should be on our minds right now.” I told him, but I was kissing him back, needing to extinguish the growing lust in my heart for him. The battle with the Bachums could wait. We had to have one last round, just in case it was the very last time.
He pulled my shirt over my head and as my lips moved down his neck, he laid me down in the grass beneath a weeping willow tree. I watched for a moment as the flowing leaves swayed lightly behind him in the deliciously pure, crisp wind. I unzipped his jeans and reached beneath the hemline of his boxers...
“James! Brynna!”
We both stopped, still breathing heavily. His forehead was pressed to mine, and his eyes were squeezed shut.
“I'm going to kill that man, Brynna.” He muttered to me before turning back to face the direction from which Don's voice had come. “What do you want?!”
I covered my mouth as I giggled. I could not help it. It was somewhat humorous. James looked at me, his white eyes turning back to their normal shade of soft brown. He leaned down, smiling slightly, too. His lips grazed mine and then pressed to them, this time harder than before; he was telling me silently that we would finish what we had started later.
“You think it's funny?” He asked me teasingly as his hands ran up the sides of my thighs and moved around to caress my backside that had been catching his eye so frequently that evening. He pulled me up so I was sitting in his lap.
“Only slightly.” I kissed him quite amorously, for I was aching to continue. But knowing that Don was still lurking about, waiting for us to join him, ripped the romantic mood to shreds. I was certainly not going to follow through on those carnal urges while someone, especially him, stood so near.
“I understand that with all the tension and anger in the air that the blood starts to run hot and all that. It's very difficult to suppress every animal instinct, including the urge to mate.”
I looked at James before bursting into laughter and burying my face in his neck to stifle the sound. Don's words were not that of a brutal, bloodthirsty tribe leader but of a high school biology teacher awkwardly preaching abstinence. My raucous laughter set James off, though he never quite achieved my level of amused hysteria. Men were always angrier at interruptions than women were. I certainly hated that James and I could not continue; my body and mind pleaded with me to forget Don's presence. But I could certainly recognize the humor completely in Don's gentle prodding, while James barely could.
I pulled my shirt on, still chuckling softly to myself. When we returned to Don, he was looking away from us.
“I do apologize. Believe me, I'm all about doing what makes you happy. You two are well aware of that. But we've got a fight to get to. After that, do what you want.” He turned and walked away, muttering to himself about rambunctious, horny teenagers and forty-something year old men who should know better. I practically collapsed as the fit of giggles took me. James was the rock-solid pillar that kept me standing.
He wrapped his arm around my neck. We continued our walk behind Don.
For a few precious moments, we had forgotten the battle that was to be waged. We had allowed our spirits to join together in a moment of primal impulse and human connectivity. Our closeness had erased the fear we carried as we both silently pondered how we would continue our lives on Pangaea without one another. I grasped James's hand tightly in mine for a moment. My breathing had suddenly gone shallow, and I struggled not to stop walking so I could turn to him and throw myself into his arms. I wanted to cry hysterically while begging him to come home with me. How could I live without him?
My heart literally skipped several beats at the thought. When I looked up at him, his lips tenderly caressed mine.
“I'm right here.” He whispered to me. We were close to the others, and he knew that I would not want anyone to know I was suffering from any ill emotion. I needed to be seen as fearless, lest I wished my fellow soldiers to pity or otherwise disrespect me.
“We're going to be fine. We're going to see the end of this. We're going to get home to Penny and Violet before you know it.”
“Whatever happens, just make it out of this.” I looked at him with the very plea I had just spoken even clearer in my eyes. “Promise me you will still be here tomorrow. You will do whatever is necessary to survive and go back home with me.”
He kissed me softly again.
“I promise,” He grinned slightly, “I'll meet you at the finish line.”
I rested my head against his shoulder. We continued walking.
***

The Bachums' devotion to a higher power had certainly paid off for them. They moved north quickly with nothing but their luggage and whatever supplies they could carry. I cannot imagine how they survived the biting cold unless a miracle had been bestowed upon them by God or the Gods. After a day of walking, our heightened immune systems were crashing, leaving us open to frostbite and unknown Pangaean diseases. I could not help but worry for our lives.
“We have to stop!” Elijah shouted to Don as the wind and snow cast an almighty shield between us and the Bachums. “We have to camp for the night, Don!”
Don turned around to observe the “soldiers” in whom he had such pride. Several were stumbling along, shivering so violently they appeared to be seizing. Ones who could not walk were being carried; James and I were pulling Wes between us. No matter how aggravating the boy’s repulsively foul sense of humor was, we could not leave him behind to die in the snow.
“No!” Don called back to us, “They could pass by here! They'll kill us all!”
“We don't have a choice!” Christina, another woman who had joined our cause, shouted furiously, “We need to wait until this storm passes!”
“We need to keep going!” Don yelled insistently, “Come on! We can make it!”
“You're wrong!” Christina's son, Derek, bellowed in a rage that matched his mother's. In fact, they were even standing in identical poses of anger. 
“Just start pitching the tents!” I called over the howling wind, “He'll stop!”
I was surprised that everyone obeyed my command immediately. Of course, my order was the more popular of the two. Of course they would follow it. I caught Don's scowl. Instead of shrinking back as I am sure most would have after seeing the overly emotional performance he churned out the night before, I stared back, my eyes blazing with a fire that far surpassed his.
Don and I were no longer seeing eye to eye. Gone were the moments of levity between us. He was well aware now that I was becoming the more popular leader between the two of us. I understood what people wanted, needed, feared, and loved far more than he was capable of knowing. I could not help but smile to myself. Immediately, I erased the smirk from my face out of fear that it would freeze there. I reached up to feel my nose and gasped in pain at my own touch.
“Please don't hit me with that.” I managed to gasp out to James as he got ready to hammer the stake for the tent into the ground.
“No. You haven't made me that mad yet. You try to steal the blankets tonight like you always do, though…”
Even in the worst circumstantial binds, he managed to make jokes. I laughed and held onto the stake even more tightly. I only flinched the first time. After that, I knew that his hands were steady despite the cold, and he would not hurt me.
We crawled into the tent finally, watching as the canvas over our heads shook violently in the wind. My clothes were soaked through from the constant assault of snow and ice. I turned around to see him already peeling out of his equally saturated garments. I began to do the same.
“James!” I exclaimed in horror as I tried to unzip my light sweatshirt only to find that my fingers were no longer functional. He whipped around, his eyes wide in momentary terror. Upon finding me perfectly well except for the partial paralysis, he moved over to me. 
“They're just cold, baby.”
The cold had weakened us both so terribly. Even whispering was painful. Every word jerked out of us as our bodies contorted in violent shivers. His blue-tinted lips worked into a frown of concentration as his fingers maneuvered around the zipper of my sweatshirt. He pulled it down slowly and then pushed the jacket off when the zipper finally broke apart. He pulled my shirt over my head with great effort, but the real challenge was getting my jeans off.
“How do you like these tight jeans now?” I gasped out, prompting him to laugh weakly.
“We really didn't think this through at all, did we? Going north... gets colder, right? Simplest concept... Baby, you're the genius... I blame you...”
“Shut up... James...” The laugh that escaped me almost brought me to my knees. I had never been so cold. I had not thought it possible for the body to withstand such extreme freezing. I did not understand how it was possible to survive such an assault on the sense of touch. My skin burned even as it froze, the perfect paradox...
“Come on.” He urged me softly. I stepped out of my jeans, holding onto his firm shoulders to keep from falling over. “That's it. Whoa, whoa!” My legs gave out beneath me, and my arms flew around his neck; I held on to avoid hitting the hard, frozen ground. He was on his knees, holding me around the middle.
“Easy, baby. Let's go.” He turned me sideways and let me collapse into his arms. Being so near death was provoking emotions in me. Luckily, my tear ducts seemed to have frozen shut, forever locking my rare tears inside. My frozen tears stuck in place forever were a permanent, tangible reminder of something I had always known: I could not cry. How ironic...
James made sure that I was deep inside the sleeping bag before he crawled in beside me. I cuddled up against his chest and locked my trembling arms around him. His were around me, too, holding me snugly.
“Remember when I commented on your chivalry?” I whispered to him.
“Yeah.”
“You just proved it again.”
Another laugh. A kiss on my forehead.
“I try to make up for all the times when I'm a dog, remember? It’s just…” He shuddered for a minute, “…good karma.”
“Good to know.” I whispered, “James…” My voice rose suddenly as fear began to fill my chest with a cold almost as deadly as the stinging air outside of our tent. I would be nothing but a solid block of ice soon; I had always been so cold internally, ever since I was young and made the decision not to feel. Now I would be frozen externally as well. How ironic…
“Shh…” James whispered, “We’re alright, baby. Everything is going to be okay.”
I shook my head, cringing when my muscles, also frozen, were forced to jerk back to life with the movement.
“This is it. We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
He kissed my forehead and held me to him even more tightly.
“You’re asking me? You’re the one who knows everything.”
“I don’t see anything right now. That can’t be a comforting sign, can it?”
“We’re immortal. Can we die?”
“I feel like I’m dying. So yes, I suppose we can.”
“Just keep talking. Just stay awake.” He urged me, “We’re going to get through…”
His silence alarmed me. I sat up, turning our bodies so he was lying beneath me. I grasped his face in my numb, almost unmovable hands.
“James?” I shook him only slightly. My strength was failing. I could summon not even a quarter of the power I was able to wield normally. I wanted to lay my head on his chest, close my eyes, and let destiny have its way with us both. I did not want to fight anymore, in any sense. I did not want to awaken the following morning to continue our trek to the Bachum camp. I did not want to fight this war Adam had started. I understood that exterminating the other side was our only chance of living an immortal life on Pangaea. If we wanted peace, we had to earn it. Though surely, there had to be another way. There had to be a way for us to exist harmoniously. But then, was there really? The Bachums and their mindless followers hated us for what we were. We resented their hate. While we lived by Don’s lack of rules, they lived under too many rules to count. We were too different to coexist.
Hadn’t that always been the way, even on Earth?
“James, wake up!” My voice broke in the effort it took to speak passionately. I was begging him now, the fear in my heart so strong, I believed it would kill me long before the cold could. I could not lose him now. I could not bear to be without him. I loved him. I needed him. As I tried to wake him, I realized that I no longer felt any shame in how desperately I needed him or how deeply I loved him.
How many more were clutching their loved ones in the tents that surrounded us, watching as they breathed their last breaths? How many would we have lost by the following morning? Don’s fight would have to be postponed if our number was eradicated by the frigid conditions. But I did not care about Don’s war. I only cared about James, Elijah, and the people who had become my friends. We had family back at the house that had become our home. Violet, Penny… What would happen to them?
An exhausting surge of warmth erupted between James and me, manifesting where our bodies were touching. I closed my eyes and laid my head against his chest. I grasped his firm shoulders, pleading with the God I did not believe in to spare us. I had never thought about dying before. I realized that the thought provoked the same childish terror in me that was felt by all living creatures as they faced the end. We are bred with the will to survive at all costs. Death is the endgame we all seek to avoid, even if the effort to live will be what kills us in the end. It is universal. It is a malignant truth.
I was hallucinating, surely. The warmth between us was simply a physical manifestation of the love I had in my heart for him. It was the tangible intangibility of the feeling that filled me up when he kissed me, held me, or even said my name. God or Gods, I loved that man, foolishly and recklessly, but brilliantly as well…
“I have to tell you something.” His voice whispered in my ear. I opened my eyes to find that we were lying side by side in the sleeping bag once again. His brown eyes were shaded by his drooping eyelids; he was struggling for consciousness, trying so desperately to watch over me with a vigilance that had long been weakened by unimaginable exhaustion.
I shushed him now, begging him with the sound to stay quiet when only before I had been begging him to speak. I had not the strength that was needed to talk anymore. The warmth between us was a blanket so snug and soothing that I could not resist the temptation of sleep. Whatever was left of my strength was used to turn my head up so I could kiss his cracked, freezing lips.
“I have to tell you. I should have told you…”
“You love me. That’s all I need…”
I fell away into that seductive sleep.
***

If we had died then, it would have made the rest of the tale much easier. There would have been no betrayal, no fight to the death, no war that raged for countless years. There would have been no more pain. While humans sidestep the inevitable final consequence that is death, they secretly wish for the peace that it brings. Once crossed over, we no longer feel the suffering that has long defined us as humans, as being one step above the other animals in God’s creation.
The evolution we were experiencing on Pangaea was almost a step backwards, I found myself thinking as I slept. We were reverting back to the ways of our forefathers, when we walked on all fours and hunted our food with nothing but our hands and teeth. Our animal nature was our only link to continued survival. The only difference between our original ancestors that had first populated the earth and what remained of our race on Pangaea was that we felt and reasoned without pause and with an intensity strong enough to buckle our knees, so to speak…
“Brynn?”
His voice was so beautiful in my dreams. His masculinity was evident even when he spoke. I had always had a fascination with strong, protective men who would die for their significant other. Alas, James fighting for my life with more force than what he utilized to fight for his own was something else we shared in common with our ancestors. Chivalry, as I called it, always existed. Or perhaps that was ideology bred from that childlike fear I had experienced as I died…
“Brynna?” 
His lips stimulated warmth wherever they pressed on my face. Had we traveled from the realm of the living to the mysterious next together?
“Wake up, baby. Come on.”
“Her lips are starting to turn back to normal.”
What the hell was Elijah doing in mine and James’s eternal paradise? Violet used to place her hands palm of one rested on the back of the other, and twiddle her thumbs, calling the gesture in a dull monotone the “awkward turtle.” Generally, that strange hand sign was used when situations became uncomfortable in our home. I always chuckled to myself, though I was baffled as to how a shelled sea creature could possibly be clumsy or inept at handling social situations…
I opened my eyes just so the sight of James’s handsome face would shut those inane thoughts out of my mind. My brows furrowed instantly at the harsh white light over their heads. It had long been rumored that when one dies, they are faced with the blinding, comforting light of the afterlife. It is supposedly brighter than the sun, yet it does not hurt to stare into it. I closed my eyes again, moaning softly. That light behind James and Elijah was agonizing. I hated liars…
“How is she doing?” Don’s voice was as welcome as the fabled devil’s. All I needed was to hear Adam’s voice, and then my paradise would dissolve completely into hell.
“She is very strong. I am sure that in a moment, she will be on her feet, scathingly criticizing your stupidity, Donald.”
Seriously?
“Why, dare I ask, are all of you hovering over me?” I asked slowly with my eyes still covered. I was not sure if I truly wanted to know the answer to that question.
James eased me up into a sitting position. I widened my eyes and shook my head slightly to suppress the dizziness that followed somersaults performed in rapid succession or a night of binge-drinking. Or, as it pertains to this particular occurrence, once one regains consciousness the morning after almost freezing to death on a guerilla mission.
“Didn’t you claim to possess the same knowledge and wisdom I possess?” I asked as my index and middle finger massaged the center of my forehead firmly. After the tension had eased, and I realized that my question had still not been answered, my gaze snapped onto Don. “Hello? I am addressing you.”
“I said that I knew what we were getting ourselves into, coming up here.”
“You said that you knew how Pangaea worked.”
“Pangaea…” Adam repeated with a roll of his eyes and a derisive chuckle, “Such a ridiculous name…’
“It actually is not, considering that the land here is combined to form one large mass of land, which, if you are familiar with how the land on Earth was originally…” I stopped. Not worth it…
“I know exactly what you’re going to say.” Don spat at me, “You’re going to say that I should have known that coming up north would mean snow and frigid conditions, and that…’
“You are the one who claimed you were a genius.” I shook my head in condescension. “Do not snipe at me because you were too empty-headed to realize that by old world knowledge, going up meant temperatures would go down. It is all very simple.”
“So, you knew that we would come up here and almost freeze to death?” He asked me angrily. “If so, why did you come?”
“This is not about me, Donald. This is about you.” I turned my scowl to Adam, “And what are you doing here?”
“I was due for a trip north.” Adam answered vaguely.
“You are lying.” I replied as James helped me onto my feet. We were still in the tent that had miraculously remained standing despite the strong wind and the strength of the falling snow. I did not know why I was surprised; they were military tents constructed to withstand sandstorms and extreme temperatures.
I was uncomfortable with the amount of men in my tent, so I pushed past them all to move into open air. I would not be surrounded by males in such a confined space. Nothing would happen, surely, but it was still disturbing on a level I knew all too well. Once outside, I momentarily allowed my eyes to drink in the beautified landscape; the mountains surrounding me and the ground beneath my feet were both covered in the whitest snow I had ever been privileged to see. It would be a sin to trample on such purity. I remembered living in New York briefly and experiencing back-to-back snowstorms that had left the greatest city in the world buried deep.  It had been a comfortingly surrealist sight. As I observed the rising sun that was casting a soft glow on the snow-covered hills in hues of pink, orange, and soft yellow, I felt the same soothing wonder and awe. It filled me to the brim with a warmth that fended off the still-biting cold.
Then Don spoke again.
“The bottom line is, I don’t know how they made it here without your help, Adam. You said that you were on our side!”
“Your accusations hold no real weight. Perhaps your enemies found warm clothing in the ship. Perhaps they were just very lucky.”
“Perhaps both of you gentlemen need a time out.”
There I was, sticking my nose into matters that neither concerned nor interested me. Don was more than likely correct; given Adam’s mysterious nature and his disloyalty to our kind, it would not surprise me if he was aiding the Bachums as well as us. He thought himself to be the emperor of Rome and we, the gladiators thrown into the ring to fight to the death. If he wanted to aid our separate quests for survival by throwing some spears and knives into the fighting space, then he would, but only so the fight would be bloodier and as a result, far more entertaining.
“How did they make it here? The truth!” Don demanded, and I frowned at the sky as clouds appeared where there had only been the light of dawn before.
“Statement and question!” I interrupted Adam, and stepped in between them. “The shift in the weather is quite interesting. Where only moments ago there was sun, now there are clouds that foreshadow another blizzard. Are you doing this?”
“It is not me who is doing anything, Ms. Olivier. It is him.” Adam pointed at Don.
“You made that blizzard hit us last night?” Elijah demanded in rage, “What? Is that another side effect of harnessing your emotions, or whatever you said you could do?”
“That’s not me. I would know if it were me.” Don replied, but he sounded unsure. He looked to Adam for an explanation.
“That is the Bachums making that happen, though surely they do not know it. As I have been told, they are unkind to those who harness what you all call ‘powers.’”
“And what do you call them?” Elijah asked him, his momentary anger replaced by a slight fear he was not hiding well. He feared Adam’s power and rightly so; even I knew that with a snap of his fingers, Adam could kill us all. The forces of the universe that we called powers and the new, enhanced state of being we called evolution had cradled him for thousands upon thousands of years. He could utilize any of the strange powers we found ourselves now able to wield with expert precision. I knew that he was powerful, gifted with abilities by God or the Gods that we were only just beginning to understand. Yet, I did not fear him. Even when I had first spoken to him and his deep eyes had never left mine, I was unafraid. Or at least, I was mostly unafraid…
“We call them ‘gifts.’ Someone aligned with the Bachums is very afraid or very angry. They are manipulating the space around them to match what they are feeling. I am unsure whether it is intentional, meant to drive all of you back, or if they do not even realize they are doing it.”
“Do you know who it is that’s doing it?” Elijah pressed him. “Because they’ll be the first person I go after.”
“I do not know. But Brynna does.” Adam’s knowing gaze turned to me. I shuddered internally as I looked into the depths of those flawless green eyes… 
“It is our father.” The sound of my own voice and the disgusting feeling of repulsion that filled me up as I spoke of him jerked me from the hypnotic spell Adam’s eyes always put me under.
“What?” Elijah asked, “Does he know we’re coming?”
“No.” I answered. “I can feel great anger in him. He knows that he is mutating. He is a freak like his now-bastard children. His thoughts are very loud. However, I assume that we are very close. I can feel others in their camp, fearing the change. It is not accepted. To change over means to die. Am I right in all of this, Adam? Because your face is in their minds as well, so I can guess that you have become familiar with them.”
Adam chuckled softly, a sound that sent a shiver down my spine that was far more sinister than the cold that surrounded us.
“You know far too much, Brynna. Your powers stun even me. You have always possessed the ability to hold vast knowledge, to understand all things. Now that you are here, you do. It is a gift I envy. It is the only one I was not given.”
“If you want to play on both sides of the aisle, Adam, then we will no longer be supplying you with any of the fruits of our labor, literal or otherwise.” The declaration rolled off of my tongue before I had a chance to stop it. It was an expertly formed sentence, full to the brim with emotional force and ringing truth, but it was certainly unwise. Don looked at me, his eyes so wide, I feared they would fall from his head. James and Elijah stood tall behind me, backing up the assertion. Their support aided me in standing firm.
“Is that so?” Adam took a step towards me.
James was standing in front of me. Immediately, I moved around him and grasped his hand in a silent, very quick show of gratitude at his will to protect me.
“They are terrified of you. But they also hate you. We have embraced what has happened to us since we have come here. We have allowed ourselves to become more like your people with no fear, regret, or hesitation. They prosecute those who show signs of changing over. Why would you want to help them?”
“My dear Brynna,” Adam grinned and looked down at me. He stood so close that his delicious smell filled my nose, hypnotizing me for one seductive moment. I knew that that was part of his evolution, as well; his ability to seduce and hypnotize neutralized threats to him. “If I did not aid them, they would stand no chance. You know that I love the spectacle. Our race was forced from your earth, despite being much older and far superior to your own. Granted, it has played nicely in our favor. Your Earth was destroyed by the insolence of your inferior race. Now, I only wish to watch all of you crawl and fight and grovel for your place here, the way you forced my kind to crawl and fight and grovel. Unfortunately, you all have gained powers. It is almost insulting to know that you are becoming more like us, but alas, I cannot stop it, and I do accept it. I wish to see, once and for all, who will be left standing: our kind or theirs? Though, I am sure you can guess on which side I would place my bets.”
I had been unaware that Adam’s kind had ever resided on Earth. In not knowing that, I could not have known that they were forced to leave. I still did not support his war order, but I did understand, however minimally.
“You believe this will be quick. You believe that we will destroy them in one bout, simply by using what we have become. You are wrong, Adam.” The tone of my voice betrayed a genuine sadness at his inability to see clearly. In my mind, I saw that potent cloud of darkness engulfing our lives for many, many years to come. I saw Adam and his city consumed by it, both lying in the ruins of death.
I backed away a step and grasped James’s arm to steady myself.
“What is it? What do you see?” Don demanded as he pushed past Elijah to get closer to me.
“There is no end to this. There is no point in storming the Bachums’ camp. It does not end here today. It is infinite. It is so large, I do not understand it.” I turned and walked away from them all as my heart raced. I had just been gifted with a sight bred from my ability to know and see all things. That particular gift bred vast intelligence but also deep insight. What I had experienced on Earth had been profound and seen scarcely before. What I was experiencing on Pangaea was miles beyond that. I could now see backwards and forwards, though not at will. I could see the deepest recesses of a person’s soul. I could read their thoughts. That moment of understanding that the war was meant to go on was the moment my earthly self fled me, only to be replaced by who I would be for all eternity. I was no longer human in any sense.
Others would confide in me later their moments of realizing whatever fraction of them was still human had disappeared. Interestingly, it always follows a stunning revelation, though none have matched exactly what I discovered in that horrid sight.
“Look closer, Brynna!” Adam called after me, “You will be horrified at what you see!”
His words drove the stake of knowing deeper into my heart; I struggled not to double over. The house was in flames, and Violet and Penny were running, running, running…
The other natives had been watching, knowing they were not our primary enemy. The death of the boy we had taken from them had been felt by his mother and father. They wanted revenge. They would take from us what we had taken from them… It was they who were aligned with the Bachums, not Adam… Adam merely encouraged them to fight…
There were no longer two wars raging on Pangaea. There was but one, one that would require the two slowly intermixing races to align on their two different sides, to fight for their place, ideas, and beliefs…
 It was a war that had been fought so many times before, on Earth and Pangaea. The reasons were always the same. My mother had done nothing to provoke what had occurred on Earth. It was always meant to be. Wars were meant to be fought and lost by both sides in every way. There was no victory. There was no end. It was no different on Pangaea than it had been on Earth. That was a truth as old as the sun above our heads and the land beneath our feet. It was a truth that predated the existence of those who would fight and die in the senseless wars…
I was running, my insides screaming at me to move quickly and without pause. I obeyed; my legs carried me forward even as my lungs threatened to collapse under the strain of frenzied breaths. I could sense James and Elijah running behind me and others just behind them. We had abandoned everything at our makeshift campsite, including Adam. As I realized that great evil had come over our home, so had the others. I had allowed my thoughts to become contagious. They were infected with my terror and knowing; though they did not understand what it was that was driving me, they did not question it.
Endurance that never ran out was another gift of our kind. We were able to run despite the pain in our chests and legs. We were driven by the Sight…
The air was thicker, almost impossible to breathe, but we were still miles from the house. In the sky, an ominous cloud of black smoke hung evilly and eerily, beckoning us forward while simultaneously provoking an urge to draw back. Don was yelling frantically. For a moment, I caught his mental frequency; he was fearing for those he was responsible for in his heart. It was shocking to find such concern for his people in Don Abba’s mind. It was admirable.
I was coming up on the runoff that had originally alerted James and me to the presence of the structure inhabited by Don and his people. Water rushed through the ditch with the same violent intensity as the fear in my heart. Before my eyes, the water rose, whooshing past with ominous power. I did not allow myself to fear falling in, despite knowing that if I did, I would surely drown. I leaped over the water and landed gracefully on my feet on the other side. I did not stop to mentally congratulate myself for making it or to marvel at my new powers that allowed me to make such a miraculous jump. I simply kept running, knowing that soon the bodies hanging from the trees would come into view.
The smell of the rotting corpses should have forced me to stop; I was inhaling the scent, allowing it to fill my nose and mouth with every harsh breath I took. But still, I ran.
We did this to ourselves, the cynicism inbred so deeply in me scoffed, How could you believe they wouldn’t retaliate when we’ve killed so many of theirs?
Get to Violet and Penny, my mother’s voice, warm and welcome, spoke over the snidely unsympathetic bitch in me. I nodded in response to her invisible voice, my breaths raspy and my eyes wildly following the stars that danced in their sight.
I could not run when I reached the house. I could not move at all. I was firmly rooted to the spot in the wet earth, doubled over as I tried to draw in a necessary inhalation only to choke on the thick smoke that had stolen the oxygen right out of the space I was standing in.
The house was on fire, falling apart at the seams. Our people were running away from it, some screaming, some sobbing, some just wearing expressions of wide-eyed terror.
“Brynna, they hit us out of nowhere… they’re still here… they’re back there!” Rachel pointed back to the house. I looked at her with eyes that had turned over white. I no longer needed to breathe. I was on the hunt, ready for the vicious, fiery fight. Those men and women for whom I had grown to care no longer had a home. My sisters were among the mass of people somewhere; they were desperately afraid and crying out for me. Yet despite my close proximity, I could not feel their separate energies. They were far from me, farther than I could imagine.
I walked. The smoke in the air did nothing but sting my eyes, prompting tears to well but never fall. I was breathing not out of necessity but out of rage; I drew heavy, rasping, rapid breaths as I scanned the crowd of people running past me for any who were not ours.
Finally, when the last of our large number ran past, I saw not only several of the Bachums’ people but also several cave-dwellers.
Alright, I thought to myself for one brief, motivational moment, It’s on.
The roar that erupted from my throat sent them staggering backwards, tripping over themselves to run in the opposite direction, as far away from me as they could.
“They came back! They came back!” A man was shrieking in horror and waving his hands in a manner similar to what one would expect of a lunatic just freed from a straitjacket. “God help us!”
I caught up to him first, dropping down so I was sliding on my side through the wet grass and slippery dirt. Once I had caught up to him, I spun my body sideways abruptly so my legs met his ankles and he tripped. He fell face-first into the dirt before throwing himself up immediately to crawl quickly across the ground. His scream was oddly similar to the sound of Penny's when she saw a spider.
Penny!
I grabbed his soaking wet hair; rain was cascading down from the heavens in an onslaught as violent as my own. After yanking his head backwards with a force that would have snapped his neck had I allowed it, I sunk my fangs deep into his shoulder and crushed the bone in my sharpened teeth. The shriek he let out would have made a better person back off. No good man or woman would be able to tolerate such a sound of agony. I bit harder and pulled backwards to rip part of the bone clean from his body.
“Where are they?!” I screamed in his ear deafeningly. I noticed a small rock jutting out of the mud; I slammed his head down onto it before pulling him up so his back was against my front. “Where are they?!”
“Who?! Who?!” He was sobbing now and struggling to free himself from my grasp. I pushed him forward again to hold him face-down in a puddle of thick mud and streaming water. With his face submerged in that puddle, he started gasping for air only to draw in mouthfuls of that dense, saturated earth. As he struggled to breathe, I observed the scene unfolding around me through the thick, almost blinding sheet of rain and smoke; James, Elijah, and the rest of our vigilante crowd were fighting through the stream of bullets that were cutting through the air with no mercy. The sound of gunfire echoed against the trees that surrounded us, intermixing with the screams of the wounded, dying, or under siege. I watched a man with a machine gun run past me, shooting wildly over his shoulder. I pulled the man’s face from the mud as I ducked; after lying all the way on my back while still on my knees, I used his body to shield me. His body jerked back and forth as it was riddled with bullets. I was lucky that none had gone straight through him.
Several of our people, even those not on security detail, were on the trail of the man with the machine gun.
I pushed the man off of me and crawled on top of him to find that he was still alive, but barely. His torso was protected by a Kevlar vest, but given that he had no miraculous protective device to shield his neck and head, the bullet that had gone through his throat would surely be the end of him.
“Where are they?” My nose was almost touching his when I whispered fiercely again. “Where are they?!”
He was muttering a prayer to himself, making his peace with the Lord for all the evil he had committed in his life. Through the blood and mud that filled his mouth, I heard something about adultery, prostitutes, and that red-headed woman from camp whose name he could not remember. God, why couldn’t he remember? He had hurt her terribly.
The man was in a great amount of pain. I had been the one to inflict such profound suffering on him. Yet in his heart, I sensed no hatred for me. I sensed only regret; he was sorry that it had come to this. The revelation stunned me; it jerked my heart free from its proper place in my chest cavity and wrung it dry. I pulled away and ran one bloodied hand over my hair, urging myself to keep fighting, urging myself to believe those people were evil hypocrites who deserved to die…
“Come on Brynna!” I muttered out loud before slamming my hand down in the dirt. I had never had a moment of sympathy for anyone, including and perhaps especially, myself. Now, in battle, I was going to feel for another human being. I was going to question his motives, his very nature as a human being, instead of just killing him outright for what he and his leaders had done to our people and our home. My humanity, for the first time in my life, was getting the better of me. I had not even known that it existed in any remarkable capacity, and in that moment, it was suffocating me.
“That’s it! Take the rest alive!” Don shouted over the pounding rain, screams of agony, and despairing sobs. I had witnessed the fate of those who were taken alive. A swift exit from our world was an option that, in comparison, was worthy of being begged and bartered for. I turned back to the man who had turned over onto his side; the tears of pain that fell from his eyes scratched at my already raw heart with fingernails sharp enough to draw blood. I shuddered as I knelt beside him. I was soaked through with rain, covered in mud, bleeding from the fight; it was déjà vu all over again. I recalled bitterly the fight with the natives that had led my father to imprison me. I looked around at the others who had resided in our house; they revered our powers and celebrated them as gifts. I did not have to fear being persecuted for no longer being human. If I were from the camp where the man dying before me was from, I would have been killed long ago. I pitied him even more; he had the potential to embrace great power yet was not allowed to. Perhaps was even unwilling to. His devotion to the Bachums and the higher power of which they acted in favor had blinded him to the necessity of the change. It was very, very sad.
What provoked an even stronger despondency in my heart was that I knew the man would be healed only to be tortured. Several of our number were missing, according to Don’s shouts of rage. The survivors of the opposition would provide us with their whereabouts, whether they wanted to or not. Answers would be retrieved, by any means necessary. It would be excruciating for them both physically and emotionally; as they suffered unthinkable torture, they would also fear for the moment when it ended, for the end of their torment meant their deaths. It was so very cruel. It was so very senseless. I could not bear to see that man in any more pain. The only difference between us was one of opinion; that difference was certainly not worth killing one another over.
“I’m sorry…” He whispered when his eyes met mine.
I stared at him, not wanting to speak. I did not want to exchange any words with that man I had almost killed, whom I would see being tortured brutally over the following days.
“For what?” I said after gathering enough fortitude to speak.
“For your sisters…”
I would kill him. I would rip him to pieces if he did not elaborate. I needed to know what he knew. Where were they? What did the Bachums want with them? Why had he spoken of them?
“Not their fault… don’t deserve it…”
“Where are they? Where are they?!” I shouted again, and in my rage, I jerked my hand forward to dig my nails into the open wound in his shoulder. He cried out, his entire body tense in response to the great agony. Then, his muscles relaxed, and his face went slack. He collapsed on the ground, dead at my hands.
“Brynna! Where is Brynna?!”
Why in the world would Alice be demanding to know my whereabouts? I turned to find her running towards me, gasping with tremendous sobs. I shuddered at the show of emotion despite the situation. How very pitiful it was… Admittedly, the situation was one to bring forth harrowing fear and crushing sadness, but to show the world both through one’s tears was not admirable or useful in any way.
“I tried to stop them! I tried to get Penny and Violet back from them, but they shot at me!” She screamed as she threw her arms around my neck. I smelled blood seeping from a gaping wound inflicted on her that I had not yet seen.
“Did they hit you?” I asked in a trembling voice. She nodded and pulled away to show me her arm.
“I did everything I could! Quinn went after them! He’s not fast because he got hurt but he’s going after them!”
“Which way?” James and Elijah had appeared behind us; James was the one speaking. “Which way, Alice?!”
“That way!” Alice pointed behind the house. James and Elijah needed no prodding, nor did I. Alice, despite her injury, was also ready to fight for my sisters. We all took off running, a deadly herd of beasts hell-bent on killing those who had taken ones we loved so dearly.
We tore through the trees, stopping not when our bodies protested the continued assault of running without pause or even when we realized that we were alone in the forest. We just moved, smelling the air constantly for any trace of my sisters’ scents.
The only thing that could stop me was the realization that my sisters were gone, taken far from where I could reach. The joined landmass that gave Pangaea its name was endless, larger than three of Earth’s combined land put together. I stopped running, and my knees buckled beneath me. I breathed in and out rapidly, clawing the earth as I drew each shuddering breath.
“We’re going to find them, Brynna! I promise. I promise you, Brynn. I promise!” Elijah was saying to me, though I knew that he scarcely believed his own words. I threw my arms around his neck, my eyes wide in that potent terror that made breathing almost impossible.
“Oh, God,” I gasped out, “Oh, my God… oh God, oh God…”
There were no other words to convey the storm of feeling in my heart; regret, guilt, fear, sadness… I should have been there. I should not have left them alone. I should have seen it coming. Where were they? Were they going to be hurt? Were they going to live past the next day? On Earth, when someone was abducted, police and federal investigators gave the person a twenty-four hour window to be found before they could be almost sure that the worst had happened. In a day, would my sisters no longer exist?
Elijah lifted me into his arms and turned to carry me back to the house. I was petrified, frozen to him as the terror thrashed my heart from side to side, throwing it against the walls of my chest until it laid dormant, indefensible. I squeezed my eyes shut and realized that my entire body was trembling.
“It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay, Brynn.” Alice’s voice, her hands rubbing one of my arms that were wrapped around Elijah’s neck…
Once we were back at the house, Elijah handed me to James.
“Eli!” I called after him, my voice cracking in the threat of tears. He turned back to me and put one of his hands on my face. “Stay with me!”
I was begging him shamelessly, needing him to stay close, where I could see him. Only seeing him would assure me that he was alright. Our sisters were gone, taken from us. I could not lose my brother, too. Together, we would find them. Together, we would make everything alright. I could not bear the emotional burden of fearing for my sisters’ lives without my brother.
“Watch her for me.” Elijah looked up at James, speaking with a softness in his voice, showing clearly a grateful resignation of his anger. He was ready to accept him. He was tired of hating him, of worrying that he was preying on me. James had proven himself to Elijah, and as a result, had won his approval. I should have been relieved.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got her.” James replied, and Elijah nodded, thankful for him being there to protect me. James was another set of eyes to watch over me, another body to keep me safe. He loved me, Elijah knew now.
I must have whimpered, because James sat down on the cold ground so he could look me over. My wounds were internal, entirely emotional… They would not kill me, at least not quickly. I rolled out of his arms and knelt on the ground, bent over so my arms were rested on the sopping wet earth. I rocked back and forth with my head hung. The sound I was making did not precede tears, though it certainly sounded like a torrent of them were ready to cascade down my face.
My Penny… my beautiful, precious, innocent Penny… I had raised that little girl. I had loved her when our mother and father had deemed her insignificant, when Maura turned away. I had done my best, at such a young age, to make sure she grew up happily, free from the same fear and resentment that plagued me.
Violet had suffered the brunt of my frigidity. I had loved her when she needed me to, only to cruelly pull away when I decided she was old enough to fend for herself. I owed her a thousand useless apologies. I owed her warmth every day for all eternity to make up for my coldness.
I would never get the chance because someone, for whatever reason, had decided that I could no longer have them. I was angry at the Bachums, at the cave-dwellers, at Adam, at myself, at God… I was furious at God. Why did my sisters have to be pawns in that ridiculous game of tug-of-war? Why should they suffer for Adam’s cruel entertainment? They had nothing to do with the war. I was the soldier fighting. They were merely innocent bystanders. But weren’t the innocents always the ones to suffer? The guilty always walked free. In terms of conflict both domestic and foreign, the innocent civilians were always the ones to be maimed or worse. The true threat, the one who pulled the strings and ordered for the violence to occur, never showed his or her face long enough to be hurt.
It was always the innocents.
My whimpering choked off suddenly to be replaced by a mighty scream that sent the huge blackbirds flying from their nests in the surrounding forest. Somewhere in the distance, a large cat roared, frightening the smaller wildlife even more severely. When my scream abruptly stopped, I drew another shuddering breath only so I could scream again.
“That’s it. That’s it.” Alice was encouraging me softly. I could feel her hand rubbing my back. “Let it out.”
Normally, I would tell her to leave me alone, invoking a certain obscene slang term for the act of engaging in intercourse followed by the word “off.” Instead, I only screamed again, my hand squeezing hers in a tight grip. It was as though my grasp on her was the only thing keeping me from plummeting into a dark, endless ravine. My head was still hanging forward, my mud and rain-soaked hair covering my face. James’s hand was running down the back of my hair as he sat in front of me; I leaned forward and rested the top of my head against his chest. I felt Quinn’s hands on my back, too; he had found his way out of the woods and returned to us.
The terror that tagged along closely with uncertainty was driving me further and further to the edge. If they had not been there with me, urging me to exorcise those ragged, inflamed feelings from my heart, I would have fallen into insanity, most certainly.
There was one fear stronger than the fear of death, I discovered. For some, the idea of dying was enough to bring them to their knees. To leave this realm meant to enter another we knew nothing of; the fear of the unknown had always been the anxiety-provoking element in humans’ thoughts of death.
But losing those who one loves is an idea that provokes a stronger fear, by far. I loved Violet and Penny so much, I felt my heart splitting, quite literally, at the thought of losing them. Screaming did nothing to bring them back to me. But when one is terrified, one screams. Through the mist that was left after the worst of my fear had been thrust forcefully (and deafeningly) from my body by shouting, there was but one action, clearer than a Pangaean morning.
“We are going after them.”
“Yeah. We are, Brynn. We’ll find them. I promise, we will.” Alice assured me gently.
“No,” I shook my head back and forth, and looked up at all of them, “It was the Bachums who took them. They’ll take them to wherever they are living. We were so close. They knew we were coming to hit them, so they hit us first. We need to go back!”
“You want to go back north?” Quinn asked me.
“Yes! That is where they are headed. I know it is. I am going after them. I will kill anyone who gets in my way. I will go in there and kill every last one of their people if it means that I will get Violet and Penny back. None of you had better tell me that I am exaggerating, or that I am foolish to think that we can actually beat them because…”
“I’m going with you.” James interrupted me, “You know I’m with you, baby.”
“I’m in.” Quinn agreed, nodding.
“Me too.” Alice chimed in, “When do we leave?”
“Right now.” I stood up and turned to see Elijah hurrying back to us. “I know you’re in, too, so let’s go.”
“To the Bachums’ camp?” Elijah asked.
“No, to the moon, Eli!” I exclaimed in aggravation as I threw my hands up in the air and rolled my eyes.
“Okay, chill out! James, walk with me.”
I watched as he led James away from our group, my brows furrowed.
“One minute he hates him, the next he wants to bond. There is no time for this!”
“You are correct, Brynna. There is very little time for this. In fact, the longer you wait, the more distance those animals put between you and your sisters.”
I turned to see Adam standing behind me, having appeared from nowhere as he always did.
“Do you have any idea how unwelcome the sight of your face is?” I snarled at him, “If you had not started this, they would still be here! You put them in danger!” I closed the space between us and craned my neck painfully to glare up at him, “If they die, Adam, you have my word that I will kill you! You may think that you are invincible and that some lowly Earthean could not kill you even when utilizing her best effort, but you are wrong! If they are taken from me, I will end you. Do you understand me?!”
“Brynna,” Alice breathed, “I don’t think you should…”
“Understood.” Adam smiled at me dangerously before placing both of his smooth hands on my face. “You have great fire in your heart, Ms. Olivier. I admire that.”
“Do not touch me!” I shook him off and took a step back.
“But alas, while there is fire, there is also great fear.” His smile widened, and his eyes glinted with malignant madness, “That fear generally yields distrust, which has always proved useful to you. Why do you shun it now?”
“Do not even try to play your Machiavellian mind games with me, Adam. I have always possessed intelligence far above what others are capable of achieving in their wildest dreams. You will never win.”
“I am not playing a game with you, Brynna. In fact, what I speak of is very serious. Your fear of men has always kept you safe. Now, you trust a man with secrets far more terrible than even he cares to realize.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. He had my interest now. James turned and hurried back to us after hearing that snippet of our conversation.
“What are you putting in her head now, Adam?” James demanded furiously. Upon viewing Adam's face, his eyes turned over red.
“I am simply warning her to be wary of you. I believe that is only fair, given that she has allowed herself to be blinded by her love for you. What she feels for you is vast and uncompromising, bred from inexperience and that blind eye of which I speak. It saddens me to see such naivety in one so brilliant.”
“He says that you have secrets, James. Is there anything you wish to tell me?”
James looked between the two of us, scowling in rage.
“I want you to stay away from her, do you understand me?” He barked forcefully as he pointed at Adam. “She doesn’t need to hear your lies. What’s happening is your fault. If you hadn’t insisted on this war, Penny and Violet would still be with us. If you had just let us live here peacefully, none of this would be happening!”
“And you are so familiar with living peacefully, are you not?” Adam asked before turning away. “Open your eyes, Ms. Olivier. Close your heart. Do it now before it is too late to rectify the consequences of your trust.”
He disappeared among the crowd of our people. Don was leading the charge in our direction, fury on his face.
“Are you ready to go back north?” Don called to us.
“Definitely.” Quinn answered, “We’re all in. When are we leaving?”
“Right now.” Don answered, “We have a few more guns now, which should close the gap between us and them a little bit. Here,” Don handed me a small handgun. I checked to make sure it was loaded before flipping the safety on. I stuck the gun in the back of my jeans, feeling like an action movie heroine ready for an epic shootout with a sadistic villain. I forced Adam’s comments from my mind for the time being. Adam urging me to distrust James for an ambiguous reason was not important; I had to find Penny and Violet first, and then I would give James the third degree, as they say. 
“Wait a minute.” Bennie said as she stepped to the front of the group. “Some of us need to stay behind. Not all of us can make the trip, Don.”
She was right; we had elderly people and children who would not survive the harsh climate of the mountains. I looked around at them all, seeing genuine panic in their eyes. When the house had been standing, our way of life thriving inside its walls, everyone had a purpose. Everyone did their part by contributing something, even if it was just folding clean clothes or washing the fruits and vegetables harvested from the earth. Don insisted that everyone contribute their fair share willingly, and he was right. We understood that one weak link in the chain meant collapse. Those fearful individuals I was observing were going to be deemed weak by Don; though they could help achieve our goal of survival when the house was up and running, they surely could not help us fight the Bachums.
“Well, that’s not my concern right now. They came up on us and attacked those of you who couldn’t fight. They burned our house down. They destroyed everything we’ve fought so hard to build. So right now, my concern is going up there and taking back what’s ours. They took our people! God only knows what is going to happen to them! I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: they hate our kind!”
“But what are we supposed to do?” An elderly woman asked feebly as she clutched a small child in her arms. I almost covered my mouth as the urge to sob openly tightened me in its grip.
“You’re going to have to stay here. Just wait for us to get back.”
“But what if they get back before you do?” Bennie demanded, “We can’t afford to lose anyone else!”
“Listen,” Don held up his hands as though preaching a sermon. “We have survived thus far by simply adhering to my belief that everyone can contribute. Now, we don’t have that life we built anymore. We have a new purpose: We need to destroy the Bachums. They are a constant threat. They are more dangerous than I ever could have imagined. Now, it’s unfortunate, but those who can’t fight cannot be our top priority right now. All of you,” He indicated those who would not be joining us on our trek or in the battle that followed, “You all know that you can’t contribute equally anymore. Not in this new purpose.”
Ah, everything I suspected he was thinking was actually being said. At least he was honest...
“So, you’re just going to leave us here to die?” An older man asked.
“Not to die, of course not! You’re just going to have to…”
“We will find a new place to take shelter. We will leave a few behind to protect all of you. The fire is out, so we will go in and try to find whatever remains of the food supply. In the meantime, all of this rainwater is good for drinking, so we need to find containers for it.” I looked around to find everyone staring at me, shocked that I would openly contradict Don’s orders. He was our leader who had led us to safety and prolonged our lives by running a smooth operation in his house. Through his idea that all of us had to work and contribute, we had thrived. He had angered them by taking more than a fair share to give to Adam but even in their displeasure, they understood the necessity of appeasing the man who made Don’s vision possible in the first place. Their loyalty to Don ran deep, and I was trampling on it mercilessly with orders of my own.
However, as is always the case when a leader issues an unpopular order, people jump ships quickly and without a second thought. Everyone immediately set to work, doing the things that I had said. I was momentarily surprised. Then, I mentally patted myself on the back for understanding what those people truly needed far more coherently than Don did. I had towed the line when Don had taken from the joint food supply, but his suggestion that we leave those he considered weak behind to die was unacceptable and reminiscent of another man I had known. Just when I had begun to believe that Don was the leader my father never could have been, I realized that they were one in the same.
I walked over to Rachel and Bennie, who were brainstorming ideas on where to set up a new shelter.
“Ladies, I need you to make sure that everything I just ordered gets done.” I handed them the gun Don had given me.
“Wait, where are you going?” Rachel grasped my arm as I went to turn away.
“Why do we need a gun?”
“Because Don is very angry that I have overridden his order and more than likely will not follow mine. If he needs a little prodding,” I touched a spot on my arm, “Right here is a flesh wound. After that, threaten to shoot him right between the eyes.”
“Consider it done.” Bennie clapped me on the shoulder.
“Most of these people are on our side, but several of them believe that Don is right, and these people need to be left behind. You all know who you can trust.”
They both nodded.
“When we get back, we will need a way to find all of you again.”
“I’ll leave a note in the sycamore tree, in that squirrel hole at the base.” Rachel told me, “You know the one, right at the end of the runoff going south?”
“I do. Stay away from the campsite and the city. There is a cave about ten miles back in that direction.” I pointed, “Unless you wish to be confronted by Adam’s enemies and made a human sacrifice, do not go inside of it. On the subject of Adam, do not trust him. If he offers you shelter, take it, but do not close your eyes for a second. Just lay low for a couple of days until we get back, and then we will find another place. Did you two get all of that?”
“Yeah,” Bennie nodded, “Damn, girl, you’re going to be taking over from Don before you know it.”
I chuckled softly, tickled by the compliment. I was surprised by how happy that acknowledgment of my rebellion and leadership skills thrilled me. I turned to walk away, a scowl replacing the smile on my face at the sight of Don glaring at me. His thoughts screamed his desire to rip my throat out with his fangs. No one would take his power from him. He had built our lives from the ground up. He had welcomed my family and me into the house he ran. My nerve astounded and infuriated him simultaneously. I could not help but grin and raise my eyebrows at him in a silent taunt. See, Don? They do like me more.
“Are you all ready?” I asked James, Alice, Quinn, and Elijah.
“Ready.” Alice answered. The rest nodded.
“What were you two talking about?” I demanded of Elijah and James. Elijah looked at me, his wide eyes betraying that a secret was being kept. James had a magnificent poker face, but his lack of expression was enough of a hint.
“Well, we might as well tell her now!” Elijah told James as I walked ahead of them.
“Tell me what, Eli?” I looked over my shoulder at them as we walked.
“Leave it alone, Eli. Just let it go.” James ordered.
“But she’s just going to read my…”
I turned around to walk backwards and squinted my eyes at him. The whole conversation between him and James repeated clearly and without pause. Elijah’s mind was ripe for reading, because the photographic content of his memories did not just apply to images but also to entire experiences.
“Adam says that the other natives have had people in our camp.”
“Adam said that? And you believe him?”
“Why would he lie about that, James?”
“Why wouldn’t he lie about that, Eli? He’s stirring the pot. He’s trying to turn us against each other. He’s the puppeteer in this, isn’t he?”
“I believe him. I mean, there are so many of us, and it’s not like we had a ship manifest. We’ll never know who they are. But here’s where it gets worse: he says that the other natives believe that we somehow stole their powers. They don’t have them anymore. They’re pissed off that we do.”
“How in the world could we have stolen their powers?”
“I know, right? I mean, we were on Earth, for God’s sake! But that’s why they tried to sacrifice Penny. They were trying to steal back their powers while also appeasing their God. Adam says that’s why they’re exiled in the woods. His people don’t believe in all of that over-the-top religious stuff. That’s kind of what he said. I missed that part of it.”
“Adam is just freely sharing this information now? I definitely don’t believe it. What does he have to gain from suddenly letting us into the loop? Besides messing with our heads and making us distrust each other, which both of those consequences, I’ll have you know, are very effective in war. Don’t buy into his bullshit, Elijah. You’re smarter than that.”
“I do buy into it! It’s not bullshit, James. It all makes sense. They’re aligned with the Bachums because the Bachums are over-the-top and crazy!”
“The Bachums also hate anyone with powers. Why would they help these other people gain back the powers they claim are from Satan? Come on, man. Use your head! You’re starting to make me believe that Brynna got all the brains in the family.”
“James, don’t try to tell me that it doesn’t make sense. Listen… Whether it’s true or isn’t true is irrelevant right now. For the time being, we need to keep this from Brynn. If she has a reason to put to what they’ve done, she’s going to freak out.”
“I sincerely doubt that. She trusts Adam to the death, right?”
“Very funny. James, this isn’t good.”
“I know.”
“We just need to keep it from her. For her sake, we need to lie.”
“You were the one who said we shouldn’t tell her, Eli. Now you’re going to…” James stopped talking when he saw me bend over. I had suddenly been afflicted with a harsh inability to breathe. I wanted to prove Elijah wrong by having no discernible reaction to what I had just learned, but he had been right; knowing now why the other natives hated us so much was enough to bring me to my knees. Knowing the reasoning behind their attempt to sacrifice Penny was a terrifying revelation; it revealed to me their intentions.
“It’s alright.” James was holding me and kissing the top of my head. “Let’s go, baby. Come on. We’ll go after them right now.” He looked back at Elijah, “So, you were right. I’m a big enough man to admit it.”
“It’s cool.” Elijah had his hands on my back.
I broke away from both of them and continued trekking towards the forest, knowing that Elijah, James, Alice, and Quinn would follow in my wake. I was running through all the terrible things I wanted to do to those responsible for the abduction of my sisters when one of those guilty individuals strode right in front of me to block my path.
“Where do you think you’re going? Also, what do you think you’re doing?!” Don demanded savagely. I shook my head slightly and moved sideways so I could walk around him, but he was adamant on stopping me. He reached out and grabbed the tops of my arms with both hands hard. I would have winced had the fury that exploded in my heart not shielded me from pain.
“Get off of me!” I barked at him furiously, and my long fangs emerged suddenly. I lunged forward and opened my mouth, ready to rip his throat out when a sudden pain in my chest brought me to the ground.
“Yeah. That hurts, doesn’t it?” He asked with his face close to mine. I was kneeling in front of him, still trying to shake off his hard grasp even as the pain intensified. “I just amplified everything you're feeling. You think you’re going to take what’s mine? You think you’re going to rule these people? You’ve done nothing for them since you’ve been here. You’ve done nothing for anyone your entire life! I’ll kill you, Brynna. I will kill you before I ever see you taking over from me. I built this place from the ground up! I have given them everything!”
“Yes, just so you could take everything back!” I screamed at him.
I had not realized how much space I had put between myself and James, Elijah, Alice, and Quinn. The gap was closed in seconds by my enraged boyfriend, whose eyes were darker than blood upon finding me being accosted so aggressively. His hand grabbed Don’s wrist in an excruciatingly tight hold; Don was now the one falling to his knees.
“If you ever…” James tightened his grip even more, “…lay your hands…” Don’s wrist snapped in two. He cried out in pain, and I grimaced and shuddered, simultaneously disgusted and entertained. “…on her again…” James tightened his hand around Don’s other wrist.
“Stop! Stop!”
James took a handful of his hair and pulled him back so he was looking at me.
“Apologize.”
“What?!”
“Apologize. Generally that action involves speaking and the word 'sorry.’ I know that you think you make the laws around here, but you don’t. Right now, you’re going to follow mine. Apologize to her.”
“I will not apologize to her when she is the one…”
James squeezed his wrist harder. I watched as Don’s face contorted into an expression of both agony and terror at being forced to withstand even more pain.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” He cried out.
“Look at her. You look at her when you say it, you son of a bitch!”
“James…” I stood up, walked forward, and placed both of my hands on his face. “Thank you. That will do.”
“Okay.”
James released him instantly, but continued to glare down at him as he curled up on the ground and grasped his wrist. James pointed at him over my shoulder, gritting his teeth in an urge to suppress his violent inclination to rip that little man apart.
“Look at the big man. Look at the big leader now. You’re such a big man that you need to rough up a woman to make your point.” James spat at him, trembling with the fury so clearly evident in his eyes. “I am astounded that you would be so stupid, doing that right in front of me.”
“Come on.” I whispered to him before standing on my toes to kiss his cheek twice. “Come on, baby.”
My voice was the beast’s sedation. When James’s eyes met mine, they were that deep brown that glowed in the dying sun. I kissed his lips for one long, glorious moment that calmed him further. But when his eyes saw Don trying to maneuver his way onto his feet, the rage erupted once again. He stormed forward, almost unrecognizable in his anger, but I grasped his face and kissed him again.
“I love you,” I whispered to him, and his hands pulled me closer to him gently. He kissed me again with even more frenzied heat than I had used to kiss him.
As we walked away, I heard Don give another shout of pain. I turned back to see that both Quinn and Elijah had kicked him, one right after the other, in the ribs.
“We are going to pay dearly for that.” I told James dismally.
The feeling of foreboding that had failed to warn me of the danger Penny and Violet were in dragged its claw-like fingernails through my chest. I could feel Don trying to channel his rage and bring us to our knees. His grasp on the powers with which he had been bestowed would only make his eradication of us that much easier. I shuddered to think what would happen when we returned. My sweating hands held one of James’s.
“Hey,” His finger trailed lightly along my jawline. I turned my head to look at him. “No worries. Not one, you got it?”
I nodded, the trace of a smile on my lips upon being filled with that glorious warmth that accompanied the sight of him. His kiss expanded that warmth inside of me; I could feel it strongly from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. I wished I could stay forever submerged in that warmth; I would swim in it until the world no longer existed.
But Violet and Penny were in need of rescue, and I would not lose them to anyone, least of all the Bachums and the natives who had aligned with them. Or had the Bachums aligned with the natives? It was an impossibility, at least at the current time, to decipher which pack ruled the tribe.
It was unclear because at the time, it was irrelevant. What mattered was the fight ahead of us. The population of our house had been quite large, hovering in the middle hundreds. But in the northern part of Pangaea, the Bachums possessed an army that would make Genghis Khan positively green with envy. Their number doubled or perhaps even tripled ours. Yet there we were, five people facing over three thousand.
I was undaunted. I was unafraid to die if it meant the safety and prolonged life of my sisters. I had wronged both of them in so many ways; I had deprived Violet of my love after she had reached a certain age, and Penny had been born only to rectify my deadly mistake. No act would ever truly make up for what I had put them through. Nothing I did could ever erase the pain I had inflicted upon them.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Elijah told me softly after we had hopped the canal and begun our trek through the shadowed forest.
“I sincerely doubt that.”
I avoided his eyes as I spoke strictly out of guilt. I was responsible for what had happened to our sisters. If the worst happened, their blood would be on my hands. If we lost them, I wanted him to blame me. I wanted to feel every last bit of his hatred and resentment. My foolishness and naivety already warranted public and private scorn. I wanted no one’s sympathy, for I did not deserve it.
“Tell me it’s my fault. Is that what you are thinking?” I whispered to him so James, Alice, and Quinn could not hear.
“No. See, you told me you didn’t think I could know what you’re thinking, but I was right. You’re blaming yourself for this. Brynn, it’s not your…”
I closed my eyes, shook my head slightly, and held my hand up to stop him.
“I am supposed to know these things. I allowed my blood-lust to lead me away from them when given the current climate, I should have stayed right by their sides where I could protect and watch over them. I do not want to imagine, even vaguely, what might happen to them. I only want to get them back. But there is one other issue that I must resolve, and it involves you. I need to know if you blame me for this.”
“Well, I don’t.” He told me instantly, “I don’t, Brynn. Does that help you or hurt you, to know that I don’t blame you?”
“Neither. It is just something else to know.” I watched as James, Alice, and Quinn walked ahead of us. “I will never say a negative word about those two again. Alice suffered a gunshot wound because she refused to allow Penny and Violet to be taken. Quinn immediately ran after them, suffering injuries in his pursuit. They have earned my respect.”
Elijah nodded and looked at me.
“And I’ll never say a negative word about James again. He has earned my approval.”
I smiled, surprised to find how happy Elijah’s approval made me. I discovered that while I had been saying frequently that I did not care what my brother or anyone else thought of mine and James’s relationship, Elijah’s opinion did matter greatly to me. I had always operated by the laws and morals of my heart and mind, never stopping to wonder what anyone thought. Now, I was seeing that those I held dearest to me, meaning Elijah, Penny, and Violet, would hold sway over my actions. They were all I had, after all.
“What made you change your mind, if I might ask?” I asked him.
“A lot of things. He cares about you. He protects you without thinking about his own safety. He respects you. He can deal with your insanity and send it right back at you. Plus, you told him something you never told me, which must mean you trust him. Brynna,” He looked at me with eyes begging for an answer he assumed I would not give, “Why didn’t you tell me about what happened?”
I wanted to shut off. An icy glare and a hurried walk forward would affirm his suspicions that I would never disclose the details of what had happened to me. But my brother deserved to know the truth after so many years of lies.
“I did not tell you because I hated the way people looked at me after they knew. I hated seeing their pity. Sometimes, I swear to you, I saw very slight disgust. I know now that those people must have thought that I had in some way allowed it to happen. Perhaps they even believed that I had asked. Whatever the reason and whatever the emotion behind the look, I did not like it.”
He stared at me for a long while, clearly fighting tears.
“I also did not want you or Violet to ever carry that burden, even minimally. I did not want you two to wonder how you could ever have loved such an evil man.”
“How could I, Brynn?! How could I not have…”
“You were very young. On the surface, Michael was very kind. He had been present in our lives from the moment we entered that world. We all trusted him and loved him like family. It just turns out that we were all wrong.”
“Did he ever say why?”
It was a child’s question posed to me by my twenty-four year old brother. Normally, I scoffed at such displays of foolish childishness. But with Elijah, I understood; his inner goodness was as pure as a child’s and thus, he was blinded to the true nature of people like Michael. I felt as though answering honestly would crush his refreshing ignorance the way a boot crushes a newly bloomed flower. Tears welled in my eyes, forcing me to look away.
“Sometimes, there is no reason for such depravity. Just know, Eli, that I am alright now. For years, I hated everyone except for you, Violet, and Penny. I know it must have seemed like I hated you, too, but I did not. After what happened to Lucien, I did not want to cause you or Violet any more pain.”
“But that wasn’t your fault, either! How could they have said that was your fault? You weren’t sleeping!”
“I might as well have been sleeping. I just...” I rubbed my forehead with the tips of my fingers for a moment, wondering how best to continue, “I had such a firm grasp on everything around me all the time. I was always so alert that the slightest sound could make me jump up out of my skin. I would lapse into those fits and lose track of everything but still, my mind never relaxed. I just wallowed in the worst of it, trying to make sense of it all. Lucien paid the price for my ignorance.”
“But it wasn’t your fault! You were sick, Brynna. They shouldn’t have left you alone with him! And Dad was calling you a liar! I remember that! Mom believed you, but Dad didn’t! And then Mom turned on you after Lucien, and that’s so horrible, Brynn. Dad, Maura, and Mom were cruel. They deserve everything they get for what they did to you!”
“See, that is what I was afraid of.” I stopped him from walking and grasped his hand. “I told Violet this, and I will tell you as well: Do not change your feelings towards them on my behalf. Do not allow yourself to hate those you have loved your whole life simply because they were cruel to me. It is not…”
“Don’t even try to tell me it’s not worth it, Brynna. It is worth it! They told you they wished it had been you. They told you they hated you. Mom kicked you out the day you turned eighteen. Maura used to get drunk and tell you to kill yourself, for God’s sake! And I was too stupid to ask questions! I ran off to college and left you to deal with all of that by yourself! I left you to raise Violet and Penny by yourself. And worst of all, I didn’t stop that sick piece of shit from touching you!”
“Stop.” I whispered to him as tears ran down his cheeks. I put both of my hands on his face and wiped them away. “Eli, you were eleven years old. You could not have known.”
“I would have killed him. I should have killed Dad, too. I will, for every time he hit you and for every time he told you he wished you were dead.”
“No. I have made my peace with all of this, Eli. We are here on Pangaea. We have a chance to start over. Once we get Penny and Violet back, we will start everything over. We will disappear into the woods with like-minded people and live out eternity just trying to have the best life we can. That will make up for all horrible things that happened on Earth.”
He nodded, wiping at his eyes furiously, so ashamed of himself for crying.
“I’m going to lose my man-card right now.” He told me, and I chuckled softly.
“No. A little emotion is allowed under the stressful circumstances. Even tough men are allowed a few tears. If even I am saying that feelings and tears are warranted, then it must be true, right?”
“Do you love James?” He asked me. Upon seeing the look of surprise on my face at the random question, he elaborated. “You just deserve to be happy after everything. Is it serious with him? Do you think you two will be together for a long time? Do you love him?”
I looked ahead of us, observing James as he walked. That man had come along from nowhere and saved my life not just once. He had tolerated my personal slights and the intricate difficulties of my personality and past. He was quick to make me laugh or to comfort me when my anxieties grew too large to handle alone. In fact, he did not allow me to handle anything alone, no matter how much I insisted or insulted. After all of that became evident, I had wanted our friendship to progress into something more, and it had, beautifully and rapidly. I could not live a day without him. The love I had in my heart for him brought tears to my eyes and that tiny smile to my lips. Knowing that those wonderful feelings were mutual was enough to take my breath away.
“Yes,” I answered Elijah, “To all of the above.”
Elijah nodded and smiled, too.
“Good.”

Quinn

It was not smoke or shouts that had alerted us to the presence of the Bachums. It was a full-fledged inferno. I had been out chopping wood with Eric and Teresa, a married couple from Maine. We had been joking about Don’s crazy eyes, a subject that brought much laughter to many in the house. We respected Don tremendously for what he had done for us, but some things are too funny to ignore.
“Especially when he starts getting overexcited. Man, I sometimes think they’re going to fall right out of his head.” Eric told us.
“Do it again. Do the thing again.” Teresa urged him through her hysterical laughter.
Eric widened his eyes so that the whites glowed in the twilight. He pulled a sadistic, all-tooth grin and began to chop wood quickly and with gusto. Teresa and I fell over ourselves, cracking up at the impression.
“Does this make you uncomfortable?!” Eric bellowed as he continued chopping the wood in fury.
We only laughed harder.
“Better resume our work before he gets back. Just think, guys, we’re going to be completely safe pretty soon. The other side will be gone. We’ll have won. It’s pretty awesome, isn’t it?” Teresa asked with a dreamy smile.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be that easy.”
“Are you kidding? We’re tougher and stronger than they are. We’ve allowed ourselves to change over, and they’re too afraid to do the same. They think the powers are evil. God, people like that annoy me.” Teresa shook her head.
“Whatever. We don’t have to worry about them anymore. I think Brynna said something about bringing back a lot of their people. We could use more people around here, what with all the work. She doesn’t think that all of them are as devoted to the cause as the Bachums are.” Eric said, “She’s a good kid.”
“She’s a little crazy, but she’s definitely grown on me. I couldn’t stand the bitchiness before but now, it’s actually kind of funny.” Teresa told us, “She really gives Don a hard time. Don’t get me wrong, I like Don. But he’s a little intense. She calls his attention to how crazy he is sometimes. Like, I guarantee you that she was the one who told him the amount we had to contribute needs to be less.”
“Knowing Brynna the way I do, I can tell you that she was definitely the force behind Don’s change of heart. She doesn’t take that stuff lying down.” I chimed in as I threw two pieces of wood into the wheelbarrow.
“Hard to believe she’s Daniel Olivier’s kid, considering how nuts he was. We would all be dead if we had stayed. We’re just fortunate enough to have chosen the side that doesn’t tell us when we’re allowed to eat, drink, or take a…”
Eric turned around, his eyes wide. He wasn't pulling another dead-on impression of Don; there was a rustling in the trees that had nothing to do with the evening wind. Frenzied movements were breaking sticks on the ground and rustling the dirt and pine needles that covered the forest floor. Humans were approaching our camp.
I smelled the air, trying to discern a familiar scent. If any of the people had crossed my path in the campsite, I would remember their smell. We needed to know if we were dealing with humans or natives. My nose told me that we were dealing with both, but also that there was a fire burning close by.
I whipped around, being assailed instantly by a thick cloud of black smoke. My stinging eyes could see through it vaguely, but the blazing fire consuming our home was bright enough that I didn't need to ask questions. Eric and I, both clutching our axes, turned to run for the house.
“Stay here.” I heard Eric tell Teresa behind me.
That was the last I saw of them.
I ran into the house through the backdoor, shouting for Alice, Penny, and Violet. I choked on the smoke that had filled the space. When a beam crashed beside me, I jumped sideways and rolled away, just narrowly avoiding being crushed. In my quick dodge, I hadn’t realized that I was rolling right towards the fire. Even after I knew that I was safe, I didn’t realize I was burning. Only when I felt the pain did my reflexes kick in, telling me to move. I ran out of the kitchen towards the stairs.
“Quinn! Quinn!” Alice was screaming.
“Alice! Where are you?!”
“At the front door!”
I couldn’t go forward because the roof had collapsed; as a result, the many floors of the house had fallen in on each other and were blocking my way. I tried to go back into the kitchen to use the back door again, but an almighty rumble above my head stopped me in my tracks. I stumbled backwards when another beam fell just in front of me, blocking my entrance into the kitchen. I swore loudly as I jumped up out of the rubble that I had been blown into by the force of the beam hitting the ground. I jumped up and down, trying to swat the embers out of my clothes before they caught fire. Sweat poured from me, and tears pooled in my eyes; the smoke was thick, and the fire was strong.
“QUINN!” Alice screamed.
“You have to jump over it!” I heard Violet shouting.
“What?!” I exclaimed, noting that the pile of rubble between myself and them was at least ten feet high.
“It’s going to hurt, but it’s the only way!” Violet continued loudly and urgently, “Trust me, you’ll make it!”
“Oh, man…” I muttered to myself as I looked up at the towering wall of burning debris just in front of me.
I backed up so my back was almost touching the burning beam that was blocking the kitchen door. I looked up at the ceiling and pressed my hands together. “Lord, if you’re up there,” I stopped and rolled my eyes, “Never mind.”
My legs carried me forward at that inhuman speed I was becoming used to. My body acted by its own accord; my hands pulled me up, ignoring the painful burning of my skin making contact with the fire. I ran so quickly up the mountain of splintered, burning wood that even when parts slid under my shoes, I was still able to keep moving. Once at the top, I turned sideways and heaved all the force in my body forward so I slid quickly without stopping. Fresh air was intermingling with the coarse smoke, tempting me to run faster towards the open door. Alice, Penny, and Violet were there, encouraging me to run faster.
And I did run faster.
Breaking into the fresh evening air was perhaps as joyous as witnessing a new life being born into the world. I collapsed onto the wet grass, turned onto my back, and gazed into the purple sky darkened by the smoke. I breathed amazingly clear breaths; the smell of the grass and the pure Pangaean air had never been more blissful.
Penny threw herself onto my chest and wrapped her small arms around me. Immediately, she was squeezing the deliciously crisp air back out of my lungs. I laughed with the air that remained.
“You did it, Quinn! You were like Spider-Man! You ran so fast, and you jumped so high!”
“Thanks, Penn.” I was squeezing her back.
“Pretty impressive, baby. Good job.” Alice said after leaning down to kiss me.
Violet pounded my fist when I reached it out to her, but her eyes stayed locked on our burning house. I sat up, pulling Penny and Alice with me. The foundation collapsed. The roof caved in completely. The walls crumbled. The place we had grown to love as our home was gone. Violet ran her fingers through her hair before scooping Penny up.
“Come on. We need to hide before they find…”
The native that tackled her knocked all the air from her body. They tumbled end over end across the grass. Violet was sprawled out on her stomach, trying to gather her strength and wind. Penny was sobbing in pain after smacking her head hard on the ground. The native had landed gracefully on all fours and was charging them both again.
“NO!” Alice screamed. None other than Rich Bachum was storming towards us, pointing a gun and firing with a steady hand.
“Run!” I shouted after them, but Alice had already charged him. When she reached him, she wrapped her arms around his middle and threw her full weight against him. He fell to the ground and reached for the gun that had flown to his left.
“Penny! Violet! Run!” I shouted deafeningly to them.
I went storming towards the native who had attacked them. Violet hesitated for a minute too long, wondering if she should stay and help us fight. Her personality was structured very similar to how Brynna’s was built; they would never leave those they cared for behind to face a threat alone. In that moment when she decided that she would stay and fight, one of the other Bachum men picked Penny up by the back of her shirt, as though she was a dog that had to be carried by the fat at the back of its neck. He ran away with her under his arm.
“Allie, he’s taking her!” Violet screamed as she chased after him. Alice had been busy punching Rich Bachum repeatedly and cursing him for all he had done. But at those words, she rolled off of him and landed crouched over with her hands and feet both on the ground. She followed after Violet, and I ran beside her.
Violet fell over suddenly, and once she hit the ground, she screamed in horror and grabbed at her neck, her legs kicking violently.
“Violet!” My exhausted voice cracked under the strain of the desperate shout.
I struggled to push through a crowd of our people who were running from the gun-wielding Bachum soldiers. By the time Alice and I had cleared the herd of people fleeing for their lives, a native man had thrown Violet over his shoulder, started running, and put at least half a mile between us and him. Violet was motionless; I assumed that they had shot her with some sort of tranquilizer dart.
Alice and I stopped running. We were grasping our chests as we gasped for breath, but our bodies and minds physically ached to continue in pursuit of our friends.
“Where’s Nick?” I asked her.
“What?!” She asked through her tears that had emerged suddenly.
“Where is Nick?!” I grabbed both of her arms and shook her.
“I don't know! He was just with Violet before! He was inside the house…”
“If you see him, tell him which way I went. When James, Elijah, and Brynna get back, tell them what happened! I’m going after them!”
“Quinn, wait!”
“You stay here!” I called over my shoulder.
To say that I sprinted is an understatement. To say that I ran so quickly that the trees around me became an indiscernible blur of brown and green is more accurate. I felt like a hamster in a wheel; my feet pounding the ground were spinning the planet in rapid circles, and everyone I knew was struggling to hold on. I didn’t stop on their account. I only stopped when stars started to glisten against the navy blue backdrop of the night sky. There was no way of knowing exactly how long I had been running. But I turned back, dreading the moment I saw Brynna and Elijah. When I saw them again, I would have to tell them that I had failed. I would have to tell them that even after they asked me to look after their sisters, I had let them get taken.
In the present, Brynna and I were side by side, kneeling beside the river.
“I’m sorry about Violet and Penny.” I told her, choosing to forego an easy descent into the conversation in favor of swift entrance and hopefully, swift exit. We were filling our canteens and splashing the wonderfully cool water on our sweating faces. We were, according to James, seven miles out from the mountains. The air was beginning to freeze over; after filling our canteens, we were going to change into our sweatshirts and heavy pants. Luckily, our luggage had only just been retrieved from the campsite at the time the fire had started. In fact, while I had been chopping wood with Eric and Teresa, I hadn’t even known that it had arrived. All of our suitcases were waiting outside for us to pick through when the fire had destroyed the house. We had only brought what we needed with us on our journey north.
“Excuse me?” Brynna looked over at me, inhaling smoke from the cigarette that was burning between her lips and exhaling it through her nose.
“I’m sorry that Violet and Penny were taken. I should have…”
“Don’t.” She whispered to me, and I looked up at her, shocked by the defeat in her voice. I understood then that her strength and resistance were beginning to fail her. The worry was just too much to bear.
“Brynn, we'll find them. Come hell or high water, we will…”
“Hell or high water,” She laughed bitterly, “Such an interesting expression, if you think about it. It invokes both Satan and God, respectively. It is further proof of the never-ending battle between the two. For the record, I would take both the flames of the underworld or a flood from God over facing the Bachums. They are a force of the universe all their own. Their devotion to God has allowed them to recruit devout followers who will gladly die for the cause. Most of them are decent people who are just scared of the unknown that awaits on the road ahead of them.”
“Yeah, but most of them would think nothing of killing every last man, woman, and child we know. They would justify it by saying that we had been taken over by Satan because we’re different than they are.”
“Indeed. But I cannot justify taking a life simply because we disagree.”
“So, what are you going to do when we get there?” A soft chuckle of derision escaped me. “Ask them politely to give Violet and Penny back? Tell them you’ll trade some damn corn and orange cabbage for your sisters? It doesn’t work like that anymore, Brynna, and you’re smart enough to know that.”
“What I find so funny is that mere months ago you were ending your three year relationship with your girlfriend because she killed a native. Now, you are encouraging me to slaughter our opponents swiftly and without a second thought. It was you who decried the loss of our humanity, Quinn Wesley, not I.”
She was right. The hypocrisy being brought to my attention was unwelcome yet inescapably groundbreaking. We stared at each other for a long moment before she looked away; she was giving me space and silence to maul over her words.
“You’re right.” I told her suddenly as I filled my canteen up to replace the water I had just chugged back.
She grinned at me.
“Are you really surprised?”
She yelped and dodged quickly when I swatted water from the stream at her.
“Do that again, and you will not like the consequences, Quinnevra. A very wise man once said, 'You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.’”
The hysterical laughter that erupted out of me actually made her jump. Alice came over, looking between the two of us in surprise. I doubled over and grasped a rock to support myself.
“You’ll never believe this, baby!” I gasped out to Alice, “Brynna Olivier can be funny!”
Alice looked at Brynna, who rolled her eyes to the heavens as she tried to suppress a smile.
“He only thinks I was being funny. I do not succumb to a drunken state of whimsy on any occasion, least of all this one. Come along, children. Let us continue the walk to our deaths.”
Alice was laughing now, too. We watched as Brynna sauntered ahead of us, knowing that she was grinning to herself.
“Oh, and did you just call me ‘Quinnevra?’” I asked her when Alice and I caught up to her.
“Indeed, I did. That name will more than likely stick, so you might want to set the wheels in motion to begin getting used to it.”
“Where in the world did you come up with that?”
“Ginevra was a very strong character in my favorite book series of all time.”
“So you think I am a very strong man, then? Well, thank you for the compliment, Brynn. It’s unexpected, and it really makes me feel good about myself. Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. Ginevra was a female.” She wrapped her arms around James’s middle as she walked beside him. She smiled up at him when he placed his arm over her shoulders.
“Oh!” Alice was cracking up and clapping her hands.
“You’re on her side now? Traitor…” I muttered.
“Estrogen club. You cannot fight biology.” Brynna called to me over her shoulder.
“Stop!” Alice exclaimed as she laughed harder.
“Well, I don’t know how you two did it. She’s been a zombie for hours.” Elijah told us quietly.
“She just needed to get her mind off of it for a few minutes.” Alice replied, “Plus, she’s getting ready for the fight. We all are.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.” Elijah nodded, “I’m starting to feel stronger. It’s like an adrenaline rush, you know?”
“That’s exactly what it’s like.” I agreed, “Except it happens without being provoked, and it doesn’t go away. I have to admit, I dig it.”
“I dig it, too.” Elijah laughed, “The Bachums don’t know what they’re missing. Well, I guess they’re about to. We’re about to show them.”
“Yes. We are.”
A darkness came over all of us, erasing the lighthearted humor from only seconds earlier. I looked at them, seeing my growing blood-lust reflected in their eyes. Whatever naive, boyish morals I had preached before were gone; now, I understood the necessity for violence.
“Hey, Brynn!” I called up to her.
“Hey, Quinn.”
We all chuckled at the rhyme.
“I have a question.” I told her when the laughter had died away again.
“Well, you can be sure that I have an answer.”
“You said that you’re worried about taking lives of people who disagree with you.”
“That was a statement, my dear, not a question.”
“Just keep listening, my dear. I asked you this question already. What are you going to do when you get there if you don’t want to kill anyone? They’re going to try to kill you, right?”
“I said that I would not harm anyone who simply disagrees with me. I said nothing about not killing anyone. It is Don who wishes to completely eradicate the other side. As I have stated, I believe that more than half would be willing to live peacefully amongst our kind. Furthermore, I will only harm those who seek to harm myself or any of you. Those who were responsible for Violet and Penny being taken will also pay the ultimate price. Now, is that evil, or is that necessary?”
“Or is it necessarily evil?” James asked. Brynna looked up at him. “I know, that was profound. You don’t have to tell me.”
Brynna giggled softly and stood on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek.
“You are very humorous, Mr. Maxwell.”
“And you are very wise, Ms. Olivier. Not to mention, so very attractive...”
“Oh, gross!” Elijah covered his ears in horror, “Seriously, guys, I approve of your relationship. I’ve said that. But can you keep the sappy, grocery-store romance novel stuff to a minimum? It’s…”
“I know. It’s very awkward. I apologize.” James looked back at Elijah, “Seriously, I do.”
“It’s cool. You get it, though, right? She’s my little sister, and she’s dating a grandfather, and it’s weird, but I’m cool with it…”
“Oh!” Alice and I both exclaimed as James and Brynna laughed hysterically. James turned around and pretended to swing at Elijah’s head.
“It’s cool, though, because I’ve always wanted an older brother. I’ve always kind of wanted a dad, too, so you’re like, killing two birds with one stone.” Elijah continued.
Brynna laughed hysterically as she slapped her palm to her face and hung her head. Alice and I were beside ourselves.
James wrapped his arm around Elijah’s neck and held him tightly in a choke-hold.
“You’ve got nothing,’ old man!” Elijah exclaimed as he tried to fight his way out of James’s grip.
“Really? I think I’ve got something. I’m going to have your dignity in a minute, because you’re embarrassing yourself right now. You look like a mouse stuck in a hole in the wall.”
The adrenaline was coursing amongst our group like an infectious disease. We were nearing the base of the mountain now, traveling in temperatures soaring far below zero. Our winter clothes had nothing to do with the warmth that filled each of us. Our bodies were responding to the threat of the harsh conditions and the impending fight. We were preparing unconsciously. The evolutionary implications of our lighthearted playfulness were not lost on any of us. Our fear for Violet and Penny would have quickly crippled us had our adrenaline not begun to work quietly.
“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” Elijah looked at Brynna, Alice, and me, “Grandpa,” Elijah said to James who mimed kicking him hard between the legs. Elijah dodged, cracking up again, “Let’s start climbing.”
It was only after we had begun to climb that all the “whimsy,” as Brynna called it, disappeared. Our minds were focused solely on threats lurking in the snow. Our eyes and ears were alert to any signs of movement around us. Luckily, the gray clouds overhead didn’t shed the snow that was hiding within them. It was only a matter of time, we knew. We had to get in and out of the Bachum camp before another blizzard hit.
At the top of the mountain, we had a clear view of the settlement. Rows upon rows of log cabins lined the snow-covered land. At the far end of the village, a tall log pyramid had been built. No guessing was necessary to determine who lived in that particular building.
“It’s weird to see a pyramid in the snow.” I commented somewhat randomly. No one responded; James, Brynna, and Elijah were scanning the landscape, looking for the best spot to launch our sneak attack. I leaned forward to count how many people were meandering about; the total was zero.
“Where is everyone?” Alice voiced my internal question.
“I don’t know. Probably praying, or sacrificing goats, I don’t know.” Elijah replied sarcastically. “That’s beautiful, though. We can walk right in, and they’ll never know.” He looked at us, “Are you all ready for this?”
In response, Brynna began to trek down the mountain, turning her feet sideways to avoid sliding in the snow and ice. We all followed behind her, crouching low to the ground to avoid being seen.
“It’s too quiet.” Alice whispered to me. “I don’t like it. I don’t trust it, Quinn.”
I grasped her hand tightly in mine.
Brynna, James, and Elijah didn’t trust it either, apparently. When we had reached the base of the mountain, they slunk forward and ducked behind the large boulders that stuck up from the earth like giant stone anthills. Even as we got closer, no one emerged from the cabins or the pyramid at the end of the dirt path.
“Do you think they’re messing with us?” I whispered to the rest.
“Perhaps. Surely if that’s the case, then they know we’re here.” Brynna replied, “But why they would hide from five people…”
She walked forward quickly and looked all around. Alice gasped when she walked up the steps of one of the cabins and pushed open the door. James and Elijah ran forward when she disappeared into the darkness of the house. Alice and I looked at each other, wanting nothing more than to stay hidden behind the rock. The quiet of the village was unnerving; in every corner lurked a silent threat, or so it seemed. But we had suffered the brunt of Brynna’s rage when we had forced them to face the cave-dwellers alone. We knew now that we were all in that mess together; one person’s fight was everyone’s fight.
Once inside the cabin, Alice and I were both shocked to find such a reasonably sized space so sparsely populated. There were only two animal fur beds in one corner, a wooden faucet perched high on the wall in one corner with a small dial beneath it, and a hole in the floor that they clearly used as a bathroom.
“Well, I have to say that we fared better.” James commented as he looked around. “Is this their shower? I wonder if they get hot water like we do.”
“Do you see a furnace attached to these houses? No, they have only cold water. At least they have an indoor plumbing system, though, so it’s not all bad.” Brynna frowned when she looked into the hole that was carved in the floor, “Tell me this is not their toilet.”
“It smells like a toilet.” Alice covered her nose with one hand and grasped Brynna’s hand with the other, “This is a terrible place.”
Brynna smiled slightly at her purposely over-dramatic comment on the obvious.
“Look at this.” Elijah said, and we all turned to see that he was holding up one rations box and a half moldy tomato. “This is it. Unless they ate the rest, this is all they get to eat.”
“That’s foul.” Brynna muttered in disgust, “Come on. The deathly atmosphere and horrid conditions under which these people have been forced to live is provoking a high level of despondency in me to which I am not used. Come along.”
“Let me translate for you,” James told us, “'I feel really bad for these people, and I don’t want to admit it openly.'”
“Why don't you translate this, James Maxwell?” As she walked out of the cabin, she gave him the finger.
“I’m sorry, I am not fluent in sign language.” James replied sarcastically as he followed after her.
“Alright,” Brynna told us once we were all outside. “There is but one course of action to take, and it is very unwise. In fact, it is downright stupid. Yes, I am going to do something stupid.”
“What are you going to do?” Elijah asked her hurriedly, “Brynna, don’t test our…”
“BACHUMS!” She shouted deafeningly. We all gasped as her voice echoed off of the surrounding mountains, reverberating just as loudly as her original scream. “COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!”
“Brynna!” Alice exclaimed in a fearful whisper. “Brynna, stop it!”
“The adrenaline rush is messing with your head! Stop it!” I ordered her fiercely.
She laughed softly, and still, the sound echoed eerily around the empty village.
“You didn’t think I would show up?!” She was walking forward. “You didn’t think I would hunt you down for taking what’s mine? Very foolish, my dears! I adore your pyramid, by the way!”
We had reached the many steps that led to the door of the pyramid.
“Let me guess, you’re going to shoot me the moment I open the door!”
“Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door!” Alice begged her as we watched her saunter up the steps.
James grabbed her, but it was too late; she had already kicked the door of the pyramid in, sending it flying off of its hinges and ricocheting down the long, dark corridor. No bullets sprayed out into the open air to bring both her and James down. No exclamation of horror or battle cry came rushing down the hallway to meet us outside the front door.
“How very disappointing.” Brynna muttered as she turned away. James grabbed her arm roughly and spun her to face him.
“Are you insane?” He hissed at her furiously.
“I am sorry, did you want to search every cabin only to find dust and dank depression? I know I didn’t.” She jerked her hand free from his grasp. Something came over her suddenly, snuffing out the boisterous recklessness that had seized her. Her expression softened just before her knees gave out.
“It’s alright. Baby, everything’s okay.” James told her as he lifted her off of her feet.
That strange moaning sound escaped her again as she grasped his face with one hand and buried her own in his neck.
“Brynn… Brynn, it’s all going to be okay.” Elijah told her as he rubbed her arm.
Her whimpers and moans made her sound as though she were seconds from getting sick. Whatever anger I had felt at her for endangering us evaporated suddenly. Sympathy exploded inside of me. I couldn’t imagine fearing for Alice’s life, and in all honesty, she was only my girlfriend. Brynna had raised those girls by herself, sacrificing her own childhood in order to ensure that they grew up happily. Penny especially was her daughter; she even bore an uncanny resemblance to her. I couldn’t imagine the blind fear that Brynna was experiencing. I didn’t want to try.
All the adrenaline that had been built up for the fight was escaping us. Alice sat down on the log steps of the pyramid, put her face in her hands, and started to cry softly. James leaned against the ledge in the pyramid wall, kissing Brynna’s face gently and whispering soft promises to her that he couldn’t possibly keep. Elijah walked away from us, choosing to drain his fear and grief in private where we couldn’t see. I sat down beside Alice, staring at the dead village in front of my eyes. The clouds cast a gray light on the world, amplifying the sadness in our hearts. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over these many years, it’s that reaching the dead-end of the road is a harrowing and very sad thing. To look left, right, upwards, and downwards and see no path, not even one that is obscured from view by underbrush or fallen boulders or darkness, is enough to turn the bravest men and women into sobbing children. It is enough to buckle the knees of Brynna Olivier, who had never fallen in the face of any sadness, ever.
“This world is huge, Quinn. They could be anywhere. Where do we even start?” Alice whispered to me through her tears. I pulled her close as tears pooled in my own eyes, too. They fell only when my face was hidden in her hair.
It began to snow.

Violet

“Please, Lord, let me have inherited Brynna's steel spine. I'll need it now and forever.”
The prayer crossed my mind as I drifted in the depths of unconsciousness, and I meant every word. My eyes slowly opened as my heart dreaded discovering the nature of the situation I was in. All in all, it wasn't too bad; I was lying on one of the fur beds in a room that was thankfully dark. I massaged my throbbing temples, grimacing as I sat up. Luckily, the memories of what had happened at the house were still fresh in my mind; they played out seamlessly in a review meant to remind me of the danger I was in.
“Penny?” My voice crackled and broke; I was in need of water desperately.
“She's not here.”
I had begun to forget her voice, but the English accent gave her away. I turned away from the wall and saw that Maura was keeping vigil at my bedside.
“Maura.”
“That's me.” She replied with a slight smile. “Darling, it's been so long. I've missed you.”
She opened her arms, actually believing that I was in the mood for hugs and teary apologies.
“Where is Penny?” I forced my voice to rise. I needed to assert authority over the situation or they would think that I was weak and could be easily broken. It was the Bachums who had taken me; they and the cave-dwellers had aligned to defeat Adam's city people and those I had lived with happily for several months. Brynna, Elijah, James, Alice, and Quinn were in the latter group; I would not sit back and allow the others to harm them. My heart fluttered magnificently as I realized that I could now gain valuable information about the opposing side. The soldier mentality had taken over, and I was ready to learn all that I could before fighting my way out of captivity. 
Oh, how naïve I was...
“Penny's fine, Vi. You did not honestly think your father and I would let anything happen to her, did you? Or you, for that matter.”
“Eli and Brynn... What about them?” I asked fiercely.
“Elijah and Brynna have gotten themselves involved with that terrible man. What is his name?”
“Don Abba.”
“Yes. Him...” Maura avoided my eyes. I realized that she hadn't looked at me since I had turned over to see her. There was something different about her; something was broken, something was lost. Her body was frail, and her face was sunken in, giving her the appearance of a rapidly decaying corpse. Admittedly, a small pang of sympathy pulled at my heartstrings. She had always been so beautiful. Her time with the Bachums had not agreed with her at all.
“That other man,” Her brows furrowed in apathetic confusion, “Or is he a man? Adam. He's just as bad, if not worse. He made us think he was on our side. Then, he turned on us. Apparently, our offerings were not good enough for him. Whatever you all were doing where you were living clearly worked in your favor. He has aligned himself with you, hasn't he?”
“Do you really think I am so stupid that I would actually answer that question honestly?”
The dim light cast by the torches around the walls enhanced her skeletal features eerily. I shuddered slightly, a part of me wanting to reach out, embrace her, and urge her to come back with me to the remains of our house. Don would allow me to bring her, as long as she swore allegiance to him and cast away all thoughts of my father. I needed to prod her gently in that direction; no matter what had occurred since arriving on Pangaea, she had helped raise me on Earth. She had been an ever-present figure in my life. The very sight of her evoked a strange calm in my heart as the smell of summer rain filled my nose. I shook my head slightly, forcing that random serenity from my mind. It was simply an inconvenience under the tense circumstances.
“I hate that we're on opposite sides of this, Violet.” Maura whispered, and her dull, drooping eyes finally met mine. “I love you. I love Penny. You have to know that. I've driven your father mad with how much I've talked about you.”
“Yeah? Is that how you got those bruises on your face?”
They colored her pure white skin in a pattern of dark blue, purple, and black like a sloppily designed ink blot test. In the darkness, the cuts in her lip looked like piercings punctured into her flesh by an amateur.
“No. That wasn't your father.” She whispered, and her eyes diverted away from me again as her hands flew up to cover her face from my view. She stayed like that for a long while, but after starting to draw back from both me and the topic at hand, she reconsidered and leaned forward, her dead eyes alight suddenly with a need to make me understand something vital.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I could not look into her eyes for long without a shiver stomping up every vertebrae in my spine.
What had happened to her? I did not recognize the woman I had seen every day for seventeen years. I could not begin to fathom what she had been forced to endure in order for that drastic change to come over her.
“Violet, if you understood the gravity of what is to come, you wouldn't be asking me such stupid questions.”
Jerking my hands from her grasp, I stood up and began to pace. My heart raced not with the battle-ready anticipation of a warrior placed in enemy territory at the right place and time but with the fear of an abandoned child. Maura was gone. It had taken mere minutes alone with her to understand just how unhinged she had become. I wondered how many others had succumbed to such lunacy. If I spoke of that to Brynna, she would surely weigh the effects on a scale of environmental hardships and malnutrition versus tyrannical regimes and potent, never-ending fear of death. Briefly, I found myself wondering the same, and in my wondering, I found that the scale remained level.
“Why did they attack us?”
“The same reason you attacked us, darling. Adam and Tyre have spoken clearly, haven't they? Only one side can live. But it's alright.” Her hands grasping mine again stopped my furious pacing. “You're with us now. Violet, I have seen the error of my ways. We have all repented for the awful things we did on Earth. Do you want to hear the strangest thing? It was only yesterday that everyone had finally repented. Then, we attacked Don and Adam's people and destroyed them! Isn't that amazing?”
She let go of my hands to clasp her own together. While she looked up at the ceiling with tear-filled eyes, I grimaced in discomfort. Her hopeful, blind gratitude to this God she had been told encouraged war was sickening. I scowled at her, my red eyes burning into hers when she looked back at me.
“Violet, do not do that!” She jumped up abruptly and pointed at me with a trembling finger. “Make them right! Do not let your eyes change colors! They'll kill you for that! It's,” She looked around fearfully before lowering her voice to a whisper, “It's Satan that has given all of you those powers. Look at what they do to you! They make you kill! They make you control people's minds! They make you control the forces of nature when that is God's job! Violet, I need you to see clearly! Please,” Tears cascaded down her swollen, bruised cheeks, “I love you, and I couldn't bear it if I lost you!”
“I love bursting your bubble, Maura, but I sincerely doubt that your ridiculous leaders killed the other side completely. Maybe you took a few of our people. But you certainly didn't take them all. We all have powers, you're right. You're wrong to say that they're evil. You're just afraid of what you don't understand. I guess that for you, it's easier to shut off your mind and worship this God blindly even though it's crazy people who claim he exists, but I will never be that stupid, do you hear me?!” I leaned forward so my face was close to hers. “What is the endgame, Maura? Why am I here?”
“Because your father was meant to give me a gift now that we're married. He's very powerful, even here. They said that he could give me one gift, and do you want to know what I asked for?”
“I don't have to guess.” I replied sarcastically, “Well, it's a bubble-bursting extravaganza, because I'm telling you now that I'm not staying here, and neither is Penny.”
“You're safe here. The other side is dead. If they haven't all died yet, they will soon enough. We'll win, and we'll be able to live peacefully. We survived the end of days, Violet. Now, our brave soldiers are going to make sure we survive this new age, too. And we're going to fight them and win without ever using those terrible powers. It's going to be wonderful, darling, I promise. We are the chosen race, my love. We will come out of this on top. The Bachums promised us that much. The Old Spirits have been kind to us. Tyre makes sure that we are fed. He hates Adam, and he will bring him down. They will reclaim the city.”
“No, I can assure you that they won't.” I snapped at her indignantly, “Adam told us that Tyre, or whatever the hell his name is, has lost his powers. All of his people have.”
“They were farming the earth. Adam’s people. They sent horrible creatures to hunt down people like Brynna and Elijah. People who had allowed the change. They know that humans are not meant to wield such great power. Luckily, they got a lot of them. But the people who made it and have embraced those powers...” Maura shook her head, “They have to die, Violet. That's why I'm telling you to stop it. Stop it, or they'll...”
“Maura, get out.”
My father was standing in the doorway. Maura jumped up and immediately walked towards the door with her head down. Her clothes hung like draping robes from her emaciated form. I shuddered again.
While she looked on the verge of death from starvation, my father had acquired a swollen belly and fatty jowls. I grimaced at the sight of him; he had always been handsome, so handsome that two women had vied for his affections and countless others—young women, only as old or a little bit older than Brynna!—had chased after him, tongues wagging, even when he surpassed the age of fifty. Now, he reminded me of an eighteenth century king who spent his days imbibing on ale and gorging roasted pig meat as readily as he breathed. The metaphor was not far from the truth, I would soon discover.
“Violet.” He opened his arms as he walked towards me. What was it with those people expecting warm embraces after all that had transpired between our two sparring armies? Did they truly believe that I had longed for them, or that my allegiance would change with no hesitation? I held my hand up when he went to wrap his arms around me.
“I know. A lot of bad things have happened. But just know that I'm going to make it up to you.” He sat down on the chair Maura had been sitting in, and it creaked under his weight. “I was afraid that you and Penny were starving to death. But you look healthy. I'm glad. At least that despicable man and that disgusting tramp made sure you were fed.”
“Did you just call Brynna a tramp, really?” I asked with a slight laugh, “That's funny.”
“Violet, you should have no loyalty to her anymore. I saved your life in more ways than you know. Not to mention, I'm your father, and you wouldn't be here without me, right?”
“So, I should just forget that you abandoned Mom, imposed rules over the campsite that involved people starving to death, abandoned us, shacked up with Maura, and abducted Penny and me from our home?”
“I did not abandon your mother; Brynna did! I was letting people starve because I was thinking of the group. You don't think that was hard for me to do that to people? I had to think of the whole and not the parts, Violet. I don't expect you to understand that.” In his voice, I heard genuine remorse. I heard a genuine plea for me to understand.
“You're right. I don't understand that.” I told him angrily, “There were other ways, Dad, and you know...”
“I had to do what was right for everyone. We never would have survived a month if everyone had to have a fair share. Don't you see that? And I didn't abandon you! You ran away. We searched for you for days! Maura and I love each other, so yes, we're together. But that doesn't mean that I don't still love your mother. How could I not still love her? We were married for almost twenty-five years.”
“And God knows how many affairs you had! Don't try to convince me that you two were happily married! You might think that I'm still that young, immature little girl that I was only a year ago, but I remember things clearly now!”
“You remember things the way Brynna wants you to remember things.” My father hissed in fury. “I can't imagine the lies she's put in your head.”
“Brynna never even talked about you. She never tried to warp my view of you, Mom or Maura. But I do know something that you all kept a secret. I know what happened to her. I know now, even better than I did before, that what happened to Lucien wasn't her fault.”
He rose to his feet, trembling with rage.
“Lucien's death was no one's fault but hers! She went off into her head, and while she was rolling around in her ridiculous thoughts, he was drowning! My son! Your brother!”
“You all shouldn't have left her alone! Not after what happened! And you called her a liar! Maura knew it was happening! Only Mom believed her! Only Mom took care of her after it was over! That is, until Lucien died, and she turned on her, too! I believed your lies about Brynna for years, Dad. But for some reason, I couldn't hate her. Now, I know why. I couldn't hate her because all of the things you said about her were bullshit!”
“You watch your mouth!” He grabbed a hold of my face in a grip so painful that I whimpered. My body was shaking with fear; I squeezed my eyes shut when he brought back his hand. I was going to experience the same punishment he had inflicted only on Brynna. I wanted to feel the pain she had been forced to endure. I deserved it for believing their disgusting lies. But my father took a breath, released my face, and dropped his arm back to his side. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was seated again with his face pressed into his hands.
“I know now that what Brynna said happened actually did happen. With Michael, I mean. I wish I could say that I feel badly for her, but I don't. I can't, and I have tried, Violet; believe me, I’ve tried. Sometimes, I do, but then it goes away when I saw Luc’s face. When I see how he looked after she had pulled him out of the pool. I'm sure I would feel terrible if she hadn't been responsible for Lucien's death. I’m sure I would have wanted to kill him, like any father should. But that was my son, Violet.”
My heart jumped with the same startled, momentary terror that follows being spooked by someone jumping out from behind a wall and shouting in your face. His voice had broken, and he had tears in his eyes.
“He was my youngest child. He looked just like me. You can't imagine the love I had for him. He was so young, and he had those huge eyes. You remember them. They always lit up the moment I came through the door. God, I loved that little boy so much...”
He covered his face with one hand as tears ran down his cheeks. A part of me began to sympathize.
No, my mind shouted in a fury that shocked me just as much as his tears did, He doesn't deserve your pity. He is an evil man. Whatever pain he feels is karma.
Was Lucien's death karma for the evil deeds committed by both him and my mother? I couldn't bear the thought of my little brother paying the price for their sins.
“And she took him from me. She was so profoundly selfish, Violet. You've seen how she is. I've had a lot of time to think about what happened to our family while we were on Earth. I've come to the conclusion that Brynna is lying to all of us and herself when she says that she drifted off. I think that she let him drown because she was angry at your mother and me for letting Michael do what he did. She made us pay a price for our ignorance. That is unforgivable, sweetheart.”
“Yes, it would be, if it were true. Somehow, I don’t think a ten year old could come up with that, Dad.”
“She deserves that disgusting man she's with now. He's a traitor. He's a liar. He's a killer.”
“James is a good man.” I spat at him, voicing the fury I felt down to my bones. “He is good to her, which I'm sure makes you hate him. Let me ask you something, Dad.”
“Go ahead. Anything, honey.” He looked up at me.
“Why is Maura so beaten up?”
We stared at each other for a good long while. I tried to detect any emotions that flickered across his face, but none were present. There was only a thoughtless ambivalence I knew preceded an apathetic explanation that would involve at least one reference to the God they worshiped so blindly.
“Maura refused to repent for a very long time. She deserved what they did to her. But she's alright now, Violet. I took care of her myself after it was all said and done. What you need to understand is that Mary and Rich do what they have to do. They make us see the Light by whatever means necessary. They do use force, especially when people are stubborn, like Maura was. But she knows now all the things she did were wrong. She's a better person for it.”
“Will they use force on me so that I'll see the Light?” I asked sarcastically, but I was deeply afraid of being forced to endure such agonizing torture. I couldn't bring to mind readily any significant misdeeds I had committed in my short life, but I knew they would find something to punish me for.
“Of course not!” He assured me firmly. “You're only sixteen.”
“I'm seventeen. Well, eighteen now; it’s been about a year since we came here, hasn’t it?” I corrected him quickly.
“That's right. Either way, you haven't done anything that requires repentance. Us older folks, though, have done plenty. But every last one of us has paid for what we did. And the Good Lord has graced us with a victory we couldn't possibly imagine.”
“You were never religious before. You said religion was for cowards. You used to say it was a drug. Do you remember that?”
“'Before' is the key word there, sweetheart. Everything is different here. Everything has changed. Now come on, I have a surprise for you.”
I didn't want to leave the cell I had been placed in. Learning the ways of the Bachums was crucial to discovering how best to beat them, but I couldn't stand the thought of pretending to be on their side. I was a product of living under Don's tutelage; all I wanted was to see them die. They were a threat to our existence. They were the only things standing between us and a peaceful life on Pangaea.
But I allowed my father to steer me out into a torch-lit corridor. He walked ahead of me up a set of stairs fashioned from logs. With one strong thrust, he pushed open a trap door above our heads, unleashing a blinding stream of light that sent me stumbling back.
“Whoa...” He grasped my arms to keep me from tumbling backwards down the steps. “Sorry. I should have warned you about that.”
He had to practically carry me out into the sunlight. I was unable to open my eyes until they had properly adjusted. When I finally saw what was around me, I was as stunned by the beauty of it as I always was when witnessing Pangaea's natural wonders.
The village had been built into the stone walls of the surrounding mountains. The houses were beautifully constructed from wood and leaves, stretching as far as I could see. We were at the very top of the mountain; I felt almost level with the sun. It was warmer than I would have expected; the snow beneath our feet was beginning to dissolve before my eyes. The blue sky was even more brilliant from the top of the world than it was from the ground below. If I hadn't been in enemy territory, I might have cried at such a beautiful sight.
“So, this is the famous Violet Olivier.”
I whipped around to see an elegantly dressed woman studying me with hazel eyes so menacing I believed that she might have been capable of killing me with one glance. The jack-o-lantern grin on her face didn't help to dissolve the illusion. Her age bordered around fifty, but her skin bore no trace of aging. Even without any makeup on, she was still gorgeous. I noted the cross displayed on her prominent chest. Little deliberation was necessary to determine her identity.
“So, you're the famous Mary Bachum.”
“Introductions clearly aren't in order.” Her arms were around me before I could even mentally prepare for close proximity to such a snake-like creature. To avoid being stoned to death, I patted her back but still could not bring myself to squeeze her with both of my own arms.
“I am so glad that they managed to get you and your sister away from those people.” Her claw- like fingernails were digging into my cheek as she grasped my chin. “I can't imagine how scared you must have been, living with those mutated freaks.”
She insulted them so casually, I almost laughed.
“Where is my sister?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. I couldn't afford to be perceived as overly confrontational. I was outnumbered laughably, so a fight was out of the question.
“She's with your mother, of course.”
“Maura isn't my mother.”
“Mary, I was just about to tell Violet about who we've arranged for her.”
“Oh, yes!” Mary clapped her hands together once gleefully. “He is a very smart boy, your boyfriend. It took no prodding for him to realize that this is where he is supposed to be. I can see that you're smart in the same way.”
“What?” I asked, furrowing my brows, “Who are you...”
“Violet!” A voice said behind me in thrilled relief.
 Good thing I wasn't like Brynna who firmly believed she would melt at the slightest physical contact with other people. I was rolling my eyes skyward at having to endure another awkward embrace. But just as the irritation reached its peak, his smell overtook me, and I was squeezing him so tightly, I was sure that he couldn't breathe.
“Nick...” I fought the tears of relief that rushed into my eyes.
“Are you alright?” He asked me softly so Mary and my dad, who were listening closely, couldn't hear.
“I'm fine. Are you?”
“I'm perfect. Isn't this great? We're finally away from those freaks! We're safe up here. We're going to win the war.”
His eyes betrayed his lies only to me.
“Yes.” I replied, following his lead, “It's great, isn't it? Maura and Dad are here, and you know how I've missed them.”
“I love you.” He told me randomly.
“Wha...”
His mouth on mine cut off my dumbfounded reaction to such an emotionally heavy statement. We were dancing in a charade that I didn't understand. I kissed him back to keep up with him. Clearly, Nick had a plan that I was supposed to follow.
“I love you, too.” I smiled despite my vast confusion.
“That is very sweet.” Mary was grasping her heart, grinning gigantically.
“He's a good man, Vi, just like Mary said. He knows where his loyalty belongs. Plus, he's proof that you’re normal, and thank God for that! Compare him to that freak your sister is dating.”
“Shh...” Mary whispered, grasping his arm, “We are not going to speak of those awful people. God wouldn't want their names to cross our lips.”
“You're right.” My dad smiled at her, “Well, Vi, I know it's sudden, and you're probably going to be a little surprised, but Mary and Rich have a couple of rules that you have to follow. One of them is that everyone, except for those under the age of fifteen, has to be married.”
‘A little surprised’ was the understatement of the thousands of years that the Earth and Pangaea had existed. I grasped Nick's hand tightly in my own, my eyes wide. His face wore a similar expression of horrified disbelief. To think that I was only three years shy of the cut-off…
“Why?” He asked.
“Because if you love someone, you get married, of course!” Mary replied with another bright grin. She put her arms around both of us and walked us along. “It's a huge step, but it's the right step. Here, we live by a strict moral code, one that has been outlined for us by God. Following His laws has led us to victory. While that awful man, Abba, believes that people can govern themselves, we believe that people must live by the laws of God. Alcohol and the drugs that grow in the ground here are forbidden. People must uphold the traditional values of marriage; one man, one woman. That's how it's written, after all.”
“What else are we not allowed to do?”
“Oh, sweetheart, don't make it sound so restrictive! We do require all of the people we're feeding and housing to attend church services in that building.” She pointed to the large wooden structure in the dead center of the village square, “That's our church. We have services three times a day.”
That seemed a bit excessive...
“We did take some cues from your people, though. The people we had in your camp reported that you all grow your own food. They taught us how to do it, so we can thank them for that.”
“Only that.” My father added with a scowl.
“Yes. Only for that. Your sister will attend classes every day. We have several teachers in our group who will teach her the ways of the Lord. Of course, she'll also learn math.”
Wow. How progressive of them to teach Math.
“The men work while the women take care of the house. So Nick, you'll be helping to harvest the crops. Violet, you'll make sure that he has a nice dinner waiting for him when he comes home.”
Oh, God, I was going to throw up… It was like a nightmare. It was almost too clichéd to be believable, but how many people like her had I met on Earth? Every time I thought I had met the last extreme, to-the-letter follower of the Bible, I met another and another and another. Don’s way of living was like a violent, never-ending, anything-goes circus, while Rich and Mary’s way of living was a violent, never-ending, nothing-goes Sunday school. 
“When are we getting married, exactly?” I tried to sound as though I was looking forward to the forced union.
“Three days.” Mary replied, “Just a simple service. Now, gentlemen, I'd like to talk to Violet alone. Nick, if you'd like to go to the Temple, Rich will fill you in on all you need to know about your duties.”
“Alright. Violet, I'll see you at dinner.” My dad told me. Nick kissed me again and very discreetly indicated both of my eyes. After that quick gesture, he widened his own. Message received: 
“Keep your eyes open.”
An awkward silence perched malevolently between Mary and me. At least, it was awkward for me. That deceptive smile remained plastered on her face at all times. Her soft hands grasped my own as she sat us both down on a stone bench.
“I know it seems like a lot to handle. I know it seems a little over the top. We had some people suggest that we had taken away their basic freedoms. That's not the case, Violet. We have these rules because human beings need to have these rules. We are human beings, despite what Don and his band of brutes would have you believe.”
“What are the consequences for breaking the rules?”
Her smile widened and that wicked gleam in her eyes intensified. This was a woman who enjoyed seeing people punished brutally. How that fit into the Godly creed, I didn't know.
“They are severe. The rules have shaped our lives, down to the very foundation. We wouldn't be here if Rich hadn't put them into effect. Men work to ensure that we have enough food to eat. Women cook, clean, and sew, among other things. The roles are of equal importance; you must understand that.”
“Do you mandate how many children we have to pop out, too?” I asked before biting my tongue. The sarcasm was inherent, as I'm sure you've realized. Her smile faltered when she realized that I was being facetious. I scrambled to cover the misstep.
“That's what Don told us. He said that you make people have lots of babies even if they don't want to. He said that you make people...” I lowered my voice to a dramatically timid whisper. “You make people have relations whenever you say they have to.”
She closed her eyes, her smile vanished completely. I wondered if it had ever existed, given how quickly it was erased from her face. Her hands tightened around mine.
“What an awful thing for him to tell you! You poor child...”
“I've never done that before, and I'm afraid to.”
“Of course you've never done that before! Your father raised you well. Though, he did permit Maura to infect you with her cynicism and her, if I may be frank, less-than-moral ways when it comes to men. Violet, no one will ever tell you when you have to do that. You'll only do that with Nick when you're ready to, and only after you're married. That man spreads his vicious lies because he knows that what he is doing is wrong. A part of him knows that he deserves to be struck down for what he has allowed people to do in that festering, sinful place he called a home. That wasn't a home, Violet. That wasn't a family. You don't have to live in fear of men soliciting that from you. We all value marriage here, so don't worry about that for a second. You don't have to worry about being tempted with drugs or alcohol, either, because like I said, we don't allow either here. We just live our lives in peace, in the light of God. It's the best way to live, I promise you, Violet. I promise you.”
There was a warmth to her voice that hadn't been present before. I almost believed her. I know that she believed herself. She and Rich both believed exactly what my father did; they were acting with the needs of others in mind. They were promoting the greater good. I wished that I could believe the promises she was making. Besides the unequal gender roles and the brutality that they evoked when punishing those who broke their rules, the place seemed to be alright. Living under Don's lack of rules had bred some sticky situations that were whispered about while we worked. His belief that we were not fit to judge even when one of our own committed a cruel act had allowed men and women to harm one another without fear of consequences. Here, at least, I didn't have to worry about being stolen from or assaulted.
But I wasn't staying. Nick and I would be escaping long before they could force us to get married. We would take Penny and run as far from that deceptively perfect place as we could. I would not be taken in by her promises. I could see that while she insisted the laws were for our benefit, they were simply the way that she and her husband controlled others. Those other people were scared survivors of the cataclysmic event that had taken our Earth. They would follow anyone who promised them safety. The laws they lived under were comforting to them because to adhere to the restrictions meant shutting off their brains and towing the line without hesitation. It must have been nice, to have no reason to think.
“Violet!”
Her girlish squeal of excitement jolted me out of my reverie. I pulled my hands from Mary's grasp and turned just in time to catch her when she jumped towards me. Penny's small arms wrapped around my neck, and her lips pressed to my cheek.
“I missed you, Vi!” She exclaimed with both of her tiny hands on my face.
“I missed you, too, Penn. Are you alright?”
“Mommy and I talked, even though her face still hurts a lot! She’s alright, but she misses Brynna. Right? Right, Maura?” 
Maura’s eyes were wide, and she was stammering as she tried to answer, but Penny just kept talking, undaunted.
“Maura and I went for a walk, and she showed me where this gigantic eagle lives. It has these really big eggs, and it saw us, and flew away!”
I had to love her excitement and how she had no idea that we were in danger. I wanted to preserve her innocence by allowing her to believe that we were safe.
“When are Brynna, James, Eli, Allie, and Quinn getting here? Maura said they would be here soon. I want to show them the eagle!”
“Uh...” I looked back at Mary to find her scowling at Maura darkly. “They'll be here soon.”
I should have rectified Maura's mistake by saying that the rest of our family would never meet us there. That's what Mary wanted me to say. Her eyes screamed but one command: Tell that little girl that her family is dead. But I couldn't break her little heart. I couldn't even pretend that Brynna, Elijah, Alice, Quinn, and James were gone. My avoidance of saying such a terrible thing was for both Penny’s benefit and my own. I just couldn’t bear the thought of it.
“Go on, sweetheart. We'll meet you there.” Mary told us with the grin molded on her thin lips that a fox would wear upon finally sneaking its way into a rabbit hole. I heard her whispering furiously to Maura, but I blocked out her words.
“Maura says her face will be better soon. She says it doesn't hurt anymore. Don is so mean! Why did he do that to Maura, Vi?”
“I don't know.” I replied vaguely. All of the lies that were being told by so many different people were beginning to jumble together. While I wanted to keep Penny as deep in the dark as I could in regards to the precarious situation we were in, I was finding it difficult to keep everyone's tall tales separated. I would have a hard time recalling the details at will, which made protecting Penny even more challenging.
“Come on. I know you must be starving.”
“I am! And Maura said that they have lizard berry pie!”
“Lizard berry pie!” I exclaimed, mirroring her excitement.
It sounds horrible, but it’s wonderful, I promise. In fact, in the moment, the thought of it made me smile a little bit, because I remembered the look on Brynna’s face when she had first heard it spoken by one of Adam’s people. Her eyebrows had wrinkled, and her eyes had widened, and she had grimaced in utter revolt, asking as nicely as she could if it contained actual lizards, and if so, what kind, because she only ate dinosaur? Believe it or not, the Pangaean baker had gotten a kick out of that and said that he was fresh out of Tyrannosaurus Rex but would find some for her, before explaining that the pie was made of green berries from the forest that resembled lizard skin. It tastes like chocolate-covered peaches and charred sugar like what’s on the top of crème brulee, and it is utterly divine; it is so divine that I was surprised the Bachums allowed their people to have it; such indulgence was a sin, I would be told, but once in a while, sins had to be indulged. Or something. 
For the duration of our walk to the Temple, Maura stayed several steps behind us, her head down. I knew she was on the verge of tears, and my heart broke for her. I was done pretending that her suffering didn't impact me. What she had done didn't matter anymore. Every glance, every movement of her body betrayed her great fear of those people she was being forced to live with. My eyes scanned those walking past me, and my heart dropped even further into my stomach. The men sauntered like kings while the women kept their heads down like lowly servants. At least in Don's camp, everyone greeted each other warmly and happily. People smiled even while they were ramming a knife in your back or reaching behind you to snatch your belongings right off of your person. But in the Bachum camp, the men traveled in packs while the women avoided even a glance at one another.
A phrase came back to me from Bible school: wolves in sheep clothing. A Brynna-ism, as James called them, came back to me as well:
“If it seems like it's too good to be true, you're probably two steps from the edge of total catastrophe.”
I received both of those messages timidly.
***

After an awkward prayer, dinner was eaten in silence. I tried not to observe those around me too closely, out of fear of giving myself away. Penny stared around, unabashed, her brows furrowed in confusion.
“Why is no one talking?” She whispered to me.
I shushed her and squeezed her hands under the table.
After an awkward dinner, we were a part of an awkward religious ceremony that involved speaking in some unknown language, gesticulating wildly to the sky, and singing in monotonous vowels for three hours. After everyone was exhausted from all the rigorous worshiping, we fell into our seats and watched as Tyre took the podium from Rich. Rich clapped his hands, and everyone joined in immediately. When I saw Tyre glance at Penny hungrily, I nearly jumped out of my chair and charged him. Nick’s hands tightening around both of mine stopped me.
You cannot imagine the suffocating feeling of suppressing your true nature. You cannot imagine how difficult it is to stifle even your protective instinct that will guarantee the longevity of a child. I would become uncomfortably familiar with the stifling weight of keeping the beast down over the following days.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to stand before you today with joyous news. Abba's group has split. The battle was won in your favor. Congratulations.”
There was a rumble of applause so deafening, I feared briefly that the wooden walls would cave. I saw every display of happiness one can observe in human beings; everything from a small smirk to screaming thanks at the ceiling and jumping up and down in ecstasy.
“The war is not over yet, however. We still must take back the city from Adam.”
Now, people muttered darkly amongst themselves about evil incarnate and damnation. I stifled the urge to roll my eyes.
“Jesus...” Nick murmured in disgusted disbelief.
I looked at him, silently urging him not to speak.
“I know!” A woman in front of us turned around, smiling gigantically. “God is so great!”
“These people don't know anything about God or His so...” I began to whisper to Nick, but Maura smacked my hand, not looking at me. When I gasped in response to the slight pain, I also looked over at her. She gave me an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
“Richard and I believe that it is time for you all to know the great truth behind the bloodshed that has claimed the lives of so many of my people and his. Only through this great truth will you truly understand.”
Jeez, were they going to dim the lights dramatically?
“Thousands of years ago, when the Earth and Purissimus had just come into being, human-like creatures were shaped in the image of the One God. His rules were simple; you all are familiar with the Great Ten. The war with Adam began with the building of the Shining City. While my people and I wished to continue worshiping in order to show our profound thanks for the powers that He had bestowed upon us, Adam wished to harvest the world for resources in order to build an empire.”
Anger was pulsing through the crowd. Penny looked at me, her eyes widened slightly in fear. I pulled her into my lap and held her close.
“The greatest gift that was given to us was this pure land that we inhabit. Adam was destroying it mercilessly. As more of the land died, his powers only grew more potent while ours began to die away. We did not grieve the loss; we only realized that if Adam, in all his infinite evil and his love of destruction, possessed them, then surely, they were not of God but of the Beast. Our fight had been raging for many years when from out of the sky, came your ship. Our numbers had been lessened by his brutality. We were fortunate that there were those who know the Great Truth on board your craft. You all know the Truth.” He beckoned out to the audience who were hanging onto his every word. They were thrilled to be complimented by him. There was not a shred of doubt amongst any of them.
“While Adam embraces the powers of the Beast, you all are our gift from the one God. You all will aid us in achieving our victory. From out of the ashes of a ruined world came the faithful warriors for whom I had so long asked. Together, we will overthrow Adam. Together, we will claim the city and restore Purissimus to its Godly glory. It is the will of the all-mighty Creator, for this war to be fought. It is His will for us to win. Never fear defeat, my friends. We are the Chosen Ones.”
“On the note of never fearing defeat, I'd like to add this, if you don't mind, Tyre.”
“Please...” Tyre stepped away, and Rich took the podium.
“I'd like all of you men who fight to remember this: God gave his one son to die for our sins. If you are grieving those we lost yesterday, just remember that they died serving God. They died fighting in the name of Him and his Son.”
I watched as people nodded with tears either brimming in their eyes or streaming rapidly down their faces. One man even pumped his fist into the air. Rich was eating up the adulation and the show of unity amongst his people. He stepped away from the podium, beckoning for Tyre to take it again.
“Now, because we have won such a spectacular victory, we must make an offering.”
Silence. Forget a knife; a chainsaw couldn't have cut through the tension in that room. All around, people glanced, wide-eyed at one another. A woman in front of us put her face in her hands, stifling sobs. What the hell?
“Please don't fret, my lady.” Tyre told her kindly, but his eyes were glinting with malice. “It will not be one of you this time. It will be one who is consumed by the darkness. It will be one that we took from Abba. Gentlemen...”
He gestured to the door at the far right end of the hall. From out of it, two male Old Spirits dragged Eric, one of the men responsible for keeping our fires burning, from the back room. Though he fought to free himself from their grasp, he did not scream obscenities or call those people on their blind, pitilessly stupid devotion. My heart raced as I turned Penny away from the scene.
“It's Eric!” She cried to me. “What are they going to do?”
I shushed her again, my entire body trembling. Eric had been a friend to everyone; he was always ready with a joke or to laugh at one told by someone else. He did an amazing impression of Don that never failed to make every fall over themselves laughing. He and his wife had been very much loved. I wanted to run forward, throw myself over him, and beg them to stop their senseless violence. I wanted to scream, reminding them that no God in the western canon demanded ritual sacrifice, at least according to Brynna, who knew everything. Were they really so blind? Were they really so stupid in terms of the faith they claimed they followed down to the letter?
They slammed Eric down on the altar at the front of the church. People were standing, craning their necks to get a better look. I turned my head away, fighting tears and my own faltering breaths. Nick wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pulling both Penny and me closer to him. His eyes were averted from the carnage in front of us.
Arms raised to the sky and swayed back and forth as people hummed in an ominous monotone. Maura's hand snaked around my back, grasping a handful of my shirt. Even her eyes were cast down. As others screamed and cried for the sacrifice, we prayed for something, anything that would stop it. A light would fill the hall and the booming voice of the Lord would demand that they stop their pitiless bloodshed. Jesus Christ would chastise them for embracing such brutal methods of worship and claiming that they were following His code.
But the hall remained dimly lit by the torches. The only sound came from the worshipers risen from their seats, crying out to the heavens and stomping their feet, shaking the foundation of the structure we were in. For a moment, I prayed that the roof would collapse on our heads. Penny's tears ran down my neck, and I grasped her even more tightly, squeezing my eyes shut as Tyre raised the knife above his head…
Cheers erupted, and through my half-opened eyes, I saw people embracing before raising their hands to the sky in triumph and thanks.
Look anywhere else! Don't look, Violet! My mind whispered in a desperate, shaky plea. Even my brain knew that seeing Eric's mangled body would weaken the already fragile grip I held on my sanity. To lose it there in the church meant not only my death, but Penny’s and Nick’s, and maybe even Maura's.
There is truth to the belief that a subconscious part of our minds is fascinated by tragedy and gruesome sights. That part of my brain pulled my protesting eyes to the sight of Eric's body. Blood was dripping down the altar, pattering against the hardwood floor like a grotesque rain. His eyes and mouth were still wide open in his final scream of terror.
God grasped the top of the building and spun us in fierce, powerful circles. My legs were knocked out from beneath me. I hit the ground hard, feeling Penny flying from my arms.
The darkness in the hearts of those people snuffed out the light from the torches.
I closed my eyes.
***

“I am so sorry about this, Rich. I just don't think she's used to it yet.”
“Don't apologize, Dan. It's alright. It's always shocking the first time. But I'm sure she knows that it was necessary. If she doesn't know now, she will soon enough.”
Yeah, I'd know that soon, alright… Right after I realized that every evil act of man ever committed on Earth or Pangaea was for the greater good...
“Hey, Vi.” Nick's blurry outline was in front of my eyes when I opened them. I felt a cup of water being pressed to my lips and the cold liquid pouring down my throat. My hands flew up to rub my forehead. “You're alright, liebling. It's all over now.”
“How are you feeling?”
Mary Bachum's voice showed the greatest concern which betrayed her true apathy. Her voice was as welcome as a blow to the head.
“You gave us quite a scare, Violet.” She told me. “Drink that water. It will help.”
Her clawed hand squeezed my knee. I struggled not to push it off, stand up, and begin berating them all for what they had done to Eric. It had been murder. None of the other things they said were sinful actually were, but what they had done to Eric was certainly a sin.
My heart beat so quickly, I feared they could hear it; if they did, they would know my fear and beneath that, my traitorous intentions. I didn't see Penny or Maura, and Nick's eyes were full to the brim with quiet fear to rival my own. Had they inflicted my punishment for fainting onto Maura and Penny?
“Be clever, Violet. Play the part.” Brynna's voice urged me gently in my mind.
“I don't do very well around blood.” I explained ruefully. “I’m so sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Bachum.”
Mary and Rich both laughed softly, assuring me that it was alright. My father joined in after a moment of frowning at me in disbelief. He was well aware that I had always been the one to dress wounds while Brynna faced away from the injured party, her skin paler than a corpse's.
“I know. Believe it or not, a lot of people couldn't handle it in the beginning, so you're not alone.” Rich said as he beamed at me. “Mary, you even used to cringe a little bit.”
“I fainted outright the first time, too.” Mary told me as she shook her head sheepishly.
“You did!” Rich snapped his fingers as he remembered. “I felt just awful, Violet. I knew that I had better go find a flower patch that night, and bring some home for her.”
“And he did!” Mary wrapped her arm around his back and smiled up at him in genuine adoration. “It's alright, honey. I understood that it was necessary. And now, I don't have to look away for a second.” She let go of Rich and grasped my hand. God, that woman was so overly touchy.
The lie rose from my stomach into my throat before spewing out of my lips like bile. It tasted even worse, by far.
“I understand that it was necessary, too. I am really sorry that I fainted. Truly, I feel terrible about it. I feel like I distracted people from it.”
I wanted the hand of God to reach out and smack me in the mouth like I was a back-talking child. I still don't know how I found the will to say something so repulsive and untrue.
“Please, don't apologize. You and your father, always apologizing. We understand, Violet.” Rich told me, and now his hand was resting on my shoulder for an uncomfortable minute. “Now, please, Nick, take your soon-to-be wife back to your house. You remember where it is?”
“Yes.” Nick answered instantly before jumping up to take my hand. “I'll take very good care of her.”
“Of course you will.” Mary agreed, and her eyes were watery at the sight of our young love. She placed her hand over her heart as she looked between the two of us. Vomit...
She kissed my cheek and then his, still beaming like a proud parent watching her children as they went off to prom. Double vomit...
Nick and I tried not to run from the building. He kept his arm around my shoulder, steering me to the door and opening it for me like the true gentlemen he was. Once we were out in the frigid night air, we walked calmly for a few steps before upping our pace to a brisk walk. Several times, we glanced over our shoulders to make sure that they weren't following us. Never once did I let go of his hand, nor did he ever try to pull it from my grasp.
“Oh, my God... oh, my God...” I whispered. Tears were blurring my vision, and my nose was running. Snow was beginning to shoot vengefully from the clouds. We were shivering as the freezing cold wind nipped at our exposed skin. Our cheeks were red as the air smacked us for even pretending to feel such great ambivalence to the murder of a man we had known. Even if we hadn't known him, our little charade was reprehensible. We were cowards, both of us. Had Eric's eyes found me in the crowd of people screaming for his death? Had he seen my remorse? Did it matter?
Of course it didn’t. He was dead.
I was sobbing quietly as both of my hands held onto Nick's arm now.
“Where is it? Where's the house?” I croaked out through my tears.
“I don't know. I just said that so we could get out of there!” He told me as he walked us along. The terror in my heart and the cold around me shook my body into a fit of shivers that gave me the appearance of being in the throes of a seizure. The falling snow and the blazing wind had extinguished the torches that would have lit the way. We were traveling blind; I feared that at any moment, we would walk right off the cliff and tumble to the ground so many thousands of feet below. Even the stars were hidden by the clouds in the sky.
Nick stopped us so he could shed his hoodie. Beneath it, he was wearing a Black Keys t-shirt. I remembered that night in the house when we had kissed as their song played smoothly from Teresa's iPod. Sure, the hangover from the Peace Fruit was unpleasant, but the night with him had been worth it. My tears fell freely, and my cries intensified. I just wanted to go home. I wanted more than anything than to lay with him on my bed in my room and talk and read and listen to music like we always did. He wrapped his jacket around my shoulders and put both of his cold hands on my face as I told him all of that out loud. After a moment, he kissed my forehead tenderly.
“You need this.” I gasped out to him as I started to shrug out of his jacket.
“No, you do.” He replied softly, pulling the thick sweatshirt back onto me and zipping it up. “Listen to me. We're going to be alright, Violet. Look at me.”
I raised my eyes to meet his and was stunned to find that in the depths of green, there were flecks of light blue. I remembered pictures of tropical beaches with waves of the same color lapping the shores. On my bucket list (which did not regard the things I wished to do before my death, but rather before I got married and had children), I had said that I wanted to see at least five beaches that were as beautiful in real life as they were in their pictures. I knew I never would now, so I cried harder. The snow seemed to thicken even more dangerously.
“We're going to get out of here. We're going to get Penny, and we're going to run.” He whispered to me.
“We don't know where we are.” I cried, “How are we going to find our way back to them? How will Brynna and Eli ever find us?”
“We'll find them.” His beautiful eyes stared intently into mine. In his gaze, I saw another trouble that had little to do with our current predicament.
“What is it?” I asked him softly.
“Nothing. Now isn't the time.”
“But...”
“Another time, Vi.” He stopped, realizing that he might not get another opportunity to tell me whatever it was that he was withholding.
“Just tell me.”
“I shouldn't have kissed you like that. I shouldn't have done that just for show. That was rude of me.”
“No, it wasn't. It was smart. You carried me through that, Nick. I couldn't have lied like that without you helping me.”
His soft laugh warmed my ears.
“I don't know if me helping you lie is such a good thing.”
“In this case, it was. It saved our lives.”
“Either way, that wasn't real. But this is.” He closed the gap between us, and his lips were pressed to mine. The cold fled from both of our bodies. The snow around us ceased. The torches along the path erupted to life. We pulled away, stunned by the change in the atmosphere.
And we both laughed.
***

Penny was coloring with worn crayons when we returned. She beamed up at Nick and me.
“I can't wait for Brynn to get here. Look! I drew us.”
Penny's picture perfectly exemplified her childish innocence; we were all holding hands, standing side by side in the garden that had been in front of Don's house. She had drawn a huge sun and birds flying in the sky. I couldn't help but smile.
“Look at James's big muscles!” She squealed happily before laughing half hysterically at her own joke. Nick and I laughed with her while Maura merely smiled.
“Can we talk?” Maura asked me softly. I nodded before looking back at Nick.
“I've got her.” Nick told me before I could ask him to watch Penny. “Come on, Penn. We'll draw Violet when she's mad.”
Penny giggled, and I whacked him lightly in the shoulder before walking out onto the front porch with Maura. There were many steps that led to that porch from the ground; it was strange to look down and see the dirt path so far below us. The sight before me was picturesque; a snowy night scene reminiscent of a Robert Frost poem. The mountains in the distance were blurred by the torrent of flakes that drifted lazily from the heavens. I remembered Brynna's voice, reading me Frost's best poems before I went to bed. She had always been enamored with his intricate descriptions of things.
The sudden urge to cry took me off guard. I swallowed hard, suppressing the tears before they could fall. I didn't want to explain to Maura that I was simply missing my older sister. But Brynna's name would not be far from my lips that night, because Maura needed to know of the conclusion I had finally reached.
“You should know that Brynna told me everything. I found out about what happened to her.”
“Oh, did you?” Maura asked after sitting down on the wooden bench that was carved directly into the house's front wall beneath a window. “I'm surprised she finally spoke of it. That old secret has been kept locked up tight, I'm afraid.”
“You're afraid of that?”
“Not fearful, just...”
“I know what you mean. I'm just surprised that you find it regrettable that she never talked about it, considering how it makes you look.”
“And how does it make me look?”
“Like a coward.”
“Ouch.” Maura looked up at me, and I averted my eyes; there were tears streaming from hers. “As much as it hurts to hear it, you are right. I have spent so much time passing the blame off onto so many others. I've pointed my finger at Michael, your mother, Brynna, herself... You know what they say about pointing fingers, don't you? Three more are always pointing back. I deserve Brynna's hate.”
I sat down beside her and studied her intently. Now, she was the one looking elsewhere.
“How could you have stood by and let him do that to her? She was so young, Maura. Look at what it did to her!”
“I know. You don't have to tell me. I am well aware that what happened forever changed her. I've spent a lot of time thinking since we've come here. I mean, of course I have, given that I'm not allowed to have a job that doesn't involve dust rags or pots and pans. Cooking and cleaning are jobs conducted in silence with nothing but your own thoughts to keep you company. I've spent a lot of time wondering how she might have turned out if that hadn't happened or if I had stopped him.”
“Why didn't you?”
“Because I was a coward, like you said. As awful as it sounds, I knew that it was either me or her. Believe me, I hate myself for that now. I can see in your eyes that you hate me for that, too.”
“I don't hate you. I'm having a hard time loving you the way I did before. But I definitely don't hate you, Maura. I just need to understand, for my own mind, how you could have let something so terrible happen to her.”
“My pride was involved, too. I couldn't stand that my husband desired a nine year old child and not me.”
“You're not helping your cause.” I stood up and moved away from her, fuming. “Saying things like that will make me hate you.”
“It's the truth. There's no point in lying about any of this anymore. The Earth is gone. The players in that horrid production are either dead or far from me. You're the only one within earshot now, so I'm telling you.”
“Well, you should tell Brynna.”
“I should tell Brynna that I wanted to preserve my own well-being over hers and that my ego was destroyed upon finding that my husband wanted her and not me? Yes, Violet. That will resolve our differences most certainly.” Her eyes met mine. “I deserve everything they've done to me here. The beatings were my punishment for what I did. I feel like I can finally let go of the anger I have towards myself about that. That’s what they’re for, Violet. That’s what all of it is for. So we can let go. So we can feel we deserve this second chance we’ve been given. After all I’ve suffered here, I can forgive myself for what I allowed Brynna to suffer there. They did me a favor. God did me a favor. For once.”
“Well, I'm glad you've found your peace.” My sarcasm could not be ignored. She laughed bitterly.
“Who says that I've found my peace?”
“You just did.”
“No, I didn't. I said that I can let go of the anger towards myself. I said nothing about the anger Brynna feels, or you feel. Only after I have her forgiveness will I have yours. Only after you've both forgiven me will I find my peace.”
“You've sat by and watched them sacrifice people. Do you really think that's normal, Maura? Do you really think that's what God wants?”
“Of course not, darling. But didn't what I allowed to happen to Brynna prove to you that I will not stick my neck out for anyone? I couldn't do it even for her, and I loved her...” She stopped, closing her eyes for a moment before she continued. “I love her more than anything.”
“Well, I'll give you one thing: at least you're not deceiving yourself the way the rest of these freaks are. They accuse us of being evil, and yet they're murdering innocent people. They're justifying their evil by saying that they're acting in the favor of good.”
“Wow.” She smiled very sadly, almost longingly, “You sounded so much like her when you said that.”
“I know I did. Are you angry at her for telling me?”
“Of course not. I told you that I deserve for you to hate me. Besides, I'm glad she finally told someone. Has she told that man?”
“You know perfectly well that his name is James.”
“He's a monster. I hope that she has guarded her heart the way I taught her to.”
“She loves him. He loves her. There's nothing else to know. No guarding of hearts is necessary.”
“There's plenty more to know!” Maura snapped at me. My surprise at her sudden burst of anger must have shown on my face, because she offered me a quick albeit sincere apology.
“This is some fight, isn't it?” I whispered, and tears rushed into my eyes as I studied her. Both physically and emotionally, she was almost unrecognizable. Gone was the strong-willed, intelligent woman who had helped raise us. Brynna had always blamed Maura's red hair for her sassiness while ruing her own dependence on stereotypes. But I had always agreed with her, saying that in Maura’s case, the cliché was spot on.
“It is. Who would have ever thought that we would find ourselves on opposite sides?”
“Are we on opposite sides, Maura? Are you really so dedicated to these people? Do you really believe what they believe?”
“Of course I don't. But I am devoted to your father.”
“Yeah.” My voice crackled as the pressure in my throat intensified. “You've always been loyal to him. You've proven that not only here, but on Earth, too. Maura,” I knelt in front of her and grasped both of her hands. “Look at me,” She did. “He will never love you the way you love him. I'm starting to believe that he's incapable of loving anyone.”
“Is that what Brynna told you to say?”
“Why are you two so narcissistic and so obsessed with her that you think she spends all of her time talking about both of you?!” I raised my voice and broke away from her. There would be no reasoning with her. My father would always be to blame for her never-failing inclination to abandon all those she professed to love. He was, in the most pathetic way, her guiding light.
“She hasn't spoken of us?”
“No! In fact, she told me the reason why she never talks about you, Dad, and Mom. Do you want to know what it is?”
“Enlighten me.”
“She never wanted us to carry the same anger that she carries in her heart. She never wanted Elijah, Penny, and I to hate you. She said that there was no point in all of us carrying that hate. She wanted to carry it alone.”
“How noble of her.”
“I know you're being sarcastic, and you have a lot of nerve, Maura! You tear her down when she is ten times the person you are! If that happened to me, I know that I would turn everyone I knew against the people they loved if those people were responsible for something so terrible! Mom and Dad cut her off after what happened to Lucien. You did, too! It wasn't her fault, don't you see that? How could you all have let her believe that it was?”
“I don't know.” Maura shook her head. “I guess to avoid admitting that it was our fault. You're right; I don't come close to what she is. She's stronger than the three of us combined. I'm glad that she has passed that to you. The four of you were born and raised by weakness. I'm glad that Brynna possesses such great strength. I suppose everything happens for a reason. What happened with Michael was for the best.”
I stumbled over my words as I tried to respond to such a ridiculous statement. For a moment, I believed that she was merely being sarcastic. But upon looking at her, I saw that she was merely spouting off what had been forced into her head. I knelt in front of her again and put both hands on her face.
“Maura,” Tears were rolling down my cheeks, and my voice had shattered completely. “Come back. Snap out of it! It doesn't matter anymore, okay? All that matters is that we have to get back to her and Eli. We have to go home!”
“I can't leave him. I can't abandon Danny. I love him.” She cried to me with a fear so potent in her eyes and voice that I was able to picture her forty years younger, clutching a blanket to her chest as she stared into the darkness that surrounded her. Her body was wracked with deep, shuddering sobs that far surpassed my own.
“I know.” I whispered as I eased her head onto my shoulder and squeezed her tightly. “I know you do. But he let them do this to you, Maura.” I wept softly into her shoulder for a minute before finally finding the strength to continue. “I don't even recognize you anymore.”
“I know. I'm so sorry.” She managed to gasp out to me. “I want to leave here. They hurt me, Violet. They hit me, and they all...” Her breathing became ragged suddenly, and her hands clawed at my back as she tried to breathe normally. “Those terrible men… They are so cruel, Violet!” She cried even harder. “I already said I was sorry! I said that I believed, but Tyre told them I was lying! And I am! I am lying, Violet! Oh, God, they’ll kill me when they find out! But they know! They already know! She said they’ll do it soon! They wanted me to be an example, to show people what will happen if they’re stubborn. When they kill me, it will be another example, he said. Oh, God… Oh, God…”
“No.” I told her firmly. “Maura, everything's going to be alright. We're going to leave here. You're coming with us. Even if you don't want to, you are.”
“I do want to. Violet, how could Danny have let them do that to me? How could he have let them hurt me like that? I love him. I’ve loved him for twenty seven years…”
That was it. My heart broke apart into fractions. The rapidly falling snow couldn't match the tears that were streaming down my face. The howling wind was merely a whisper compared to the hoarse, quivering sobs that fell out of me like the most sorrowful melody ever sung.
“I know you love him. But I love you, Maura.” I whispered to her. “And I'm not going to let anyone hurt you again. I know that's hard to believe, coming from me. I know you must think that there's no way I can really protect you, but I will. I promise you, I'm going to take care of you.”
“I believe that. The four of you are capable of anything. I know I'm safe now.”
“Are you ready to leave?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Then, let's go get Penny and Nick. We're out of here.”
***

 “Don't take anything.” Nick gently took the rations box from my hand and placed it back on the counter. “We'll get by.”
“Are you sure? There aren't any plants up here that we can eat. You know that we'll need water. The last thing we need is to be tricked by the Shadows again.”
“I doubt you'll ever be tricked by a Shadow again.”
I remembered the terrible pain that I had suffered through after being attacked by so many of those hideous creatures, and I shuddered. Nick's arms were around me, and I was squeezing him back, drunk on the much-needed comfort. The knock at the door broke us apart.
“Go in the other room with Penny.” He told me, and the intensity in his voice forced me to look at him. I gasped when I saw that his eyes were white. He was ready for the fight.
“Change them back!” I grasped his face. “Look at me!”
When he did, I saw that the ocean was dancing to the shore and back again in his eyes. I kissed him.
“Keep them like that. They'll kill you, Nick.”
“I know. Now go.”
I hurried into the room where Penny was fast asleep on the bed, still clutching the torn and beaten children's book that Maura had brought for her. I picked it up, observing the water-worn cover: Where the Wild Things Are. I remembered overhearing Maura telling Penny that the book was forbidden. I tried to remember the controversy that had surrounded the classic children's tale on Earth, but my heart and mind had remained behind with Nick. I faced the door, closing my eyes, and listening closely.
“Where is Violet?” My father's voice.
“She's asleep. Why? Is there a problem?”
“There most certainly is.” Rich replied. “Step aside, Nick. Daniel, I'll talk to her alone, if you don't mind.”
“Maybe you should get Mary...” Daniel started to say.
“Daniel...” The edge of warning in his voice set my absent heart beating at an even more rapid pace. The door opened and Rich Bachum stood before me, grinning from ear to ear with the same menacing mischief of his wife's sadistically gleeful smile.
“You're not sleeping.”
“I woke up when I heard the knock on the door.”
“Penny is tuckered out.” He observed, “What book is this?”
My eyes widened, and when my heart plummeted, the uncomfortable drop in my chest almost left me squirming. His smile vanished at the sight of the cover. He turned to me, his eyes blazing.
“Did you bring this from your house?” He hissed at me.
“No. I didn't bring anything. I was brought here against my will, if you recall.”
Cowardice and timidity held no purpose anymore. We were leaving whether those people liked it or not; if I had to change over and kill that man standing before me, then I would. Nothing would stop me from getting Penny, Nick, Maura, and I back to Brynna and Elijah.
“I know that we logged this down in our storeroom. We labeled it as contraband.”
Contraband. I tried to remember the exact definition of the term. I recalled the word “smuggle.”
“People brought all sorts of things that were forbidden. We gave everyone a chance to forfeit things like this.” He held the book up as though he were grasping a bag of week-old garbage that had been left to rot in the sun. He grimaced at the smell.
“Do you have any idea what this book is about, Violet? I'm going to assume that you don't, otherwise you would never let Penny even glance at the cover.”
“It's about a boy whose bedroom turns into a jungle. He meets huge monsters that make him their king. They recognize and respect his mischief. It's about standing up to what scares you. It's about conquering your fears.”
The expression of disbelief on the man's face was almost funny enough to double me over in hysterical laughter. Luckily, my common sense dictated that I should remain silent.
“This book is about convening with demons, Violet. The author himself said so.”
You don't know how difficult it was not to counter such a ridiculous lie with the truth.
“The man who wrote it was a homosexual. Do you know what that is? I'm sure you do, considering that you've grown up in the twenty-first century. You all have been exposed to that and so many other poisons.”
Rich enjoyed asking loaded questions he already knew the answers to. He was sly and conniving, much to my surprise. Through hearing Brynna's opinions on the matter, I had always believed that people who buried their noses in religion were blinding themselves to the reality of the world. They allowed hate and bigotry to fester in their hearts, morphing them into unrecognizable beasts far more dangerous than any Shadow or Reaper. They were stupid, plain and simple.
It was not all religious people, certainly not. But it was those who found hate in the ultimate message of love. The message was simple, Brynna said: Love others as you love yourself. People who justified their prejudice with the words of the Lord were sinners in His eyes. People who understood the true meaning and modeled their lives after Him were both brilliantly intelligent and faithful, deserving of their place in Heaven. She didn’t say that last part; I did.
“Now, all of this is assuming that there is a God. I do wish that I believed.” Brynna had told me through the thick cigarette smoke that swirled around, encasing her in a dense, dark fog.
Rich and his people were neither brilliantly smart nor faithful; they read the words but lost themselves in the meaning they created and imposed on the world. But saying that he wasn't intelligent shouldn't suggest that he didn't possess the cunning instinct of a wolf sauntering around a doe's den.
“Our people were infected with popular culture. That fascination with vampires was disgusting. Children, just like you, were reading those books and watching those shows. God, it was terrifying for Mary and I, as parents. To see children so enamored with becoming one with the darkness, of being fed on by creatures that were, in their most basic element, missionaries of Satan...” He shook his head at the memory and looked to the ceiling for Divine comfort. “You can't imagine what that's like. One day, when you and Nick have children of your own, you'll understand.”
I assumed his tirade against the infectious abomination that was modern day entertainment was over. I could not have been so lucky.
“It wasn't just new things that we made people get rid of when they agreed to take our oath. In one family, the father was a literature professor. He had brought so much filth like this to give to his children. I'm trying to remember their titles. Gosh, why can't I think of them? I'm sure you'd know them, unfortunately.”
Brynna had given a passionate speech in school about banning books. Her two friends had said that the teacher and students had erupted into cheers at the end.
“You should have seen how bad she was blushing...” Her guy friend whose name I couldn't remember had told me enthusiastically that night.
Years later, I had somehow convinced her to perform the now-famous speech for me. It had truly been an art of persuasive communication. In the speech, she had briefly described ten books that were commonly challenged by faceless groups or raging, biased individuals. They pushed their way to the forefront of my mind as I stood there with Rich. The temptation was too great; I rattled them off much to his horror.
“The Catcher in the Rye by Steinbeck, Brave New World by Huxley, 1984 by Orwell, Huckleberry Finn by Twain...” I stopped, switching gears in my mind to contemporary literature. I could see that Rich was becoming more on edge as I depicted my vast knowledge on the books he had deemed reprehensible. “And Tango Makes Three, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Har...”
“Oh yes!” He interrupted me loudly and aggressively. He was struggling to exert control over the conversation. “Those awful books about wizards and magic, we took a lot of those.” His eyes lit up in malicious glee to match his smile.
Brynna's favorite books...
“Witchcraft is a sin, Violet. Despite what all of you down there in your camp and despite what those books would have you believe, witchcraft is a sin. I know that to you, it seems like just an innocent book. Most of these things do seem innocent, but they’re not. The influence they hold…” He shuddered in genuine disgust. “Kids were running around, wishing they were witches.”
“And wizards.” I added.
He scowled darkly at me but continued, undaunted.
“That's what Don and his people are, when it comes right down to it, and I will not suffer a witch to live. Neither will Tyre. Mary and I both are genuinely repulsed that this same man, the literary professor, I mean, was allowing his children to read those books. The whole family was exiled for that reason alone.”
“So you, the good and faithful leader of these people, threw an entire family out onto the slopes of the mountain, knowing that they would starve or freeze to death.”
“You make it sound terrible when you say it like that. No, Violet, that's not how it happened. We gave them a rations box and a knife. There are plenty of mountain animals to hunt. Anyone can make a fire.”
“How very generous of you.” I whispered icily. The animal inside of me was rearing its head, clawing to the surface to escape the darkness that was slowly extinguishing its life. I had been in the Bachum camp for under twenty four hours and was already sensing the destruction of the evolutionary force I had allowed to thrive within me. Now, the predatory instinct, fueled by the fury of a guardian grieving the loss of innocents, was coming out to play.
“That family was a danger to our group. Mary and I had to do the same to many others who didn't follow our laws. They were pathetically stupid people who were holding onto tokens of the past that are irrelevant now and were always disgusting in terms of morality. Things have been better since we burned all that garbage and threw out those people who brought it to our camp. Don't you see why Mary and I had to take action?”
“No, I don't, Rich.” My voice was trembling, and my hands were bawling into fists. “I don't believe what you believe. Does that mean that I'll be exiled?”
“No.” He whispered as he walked closer to me slowly, his eyes blazing. “All that means is that we'll have to break you the same way we broke Maura.”
No fear. Not an ounce. Not a whisper. I closed the gap between us and glared up into his eyes.
“I am taking Penny, Maura, and Nick. We are leaving tonight. For your own sake, don't try to stop us. You disgrace the code you claim you follow. You know nothing of God.”
“And you do?” His hand grabbed my chin in a painfully tight hold. He was spitting his words at me through clenched teeth. “Why? Because your sister is a mutated freak who put these ridiculous ideas into your head? If I have to beat that filth out of you myself, then I will.”
“You won't touch me!” I barked at him. All suppression failed; my eyes turned white as I prepared for the fight.
“Don't you dare look at me like that! Don't you look at me like I'm something to eat! I am your leader! You will do as I say! Or you will be...”
We were standing so close together that only one fighting action was prudent; I brought my head back before lunging forward abruptly yet forcefully. After my head slammed into his, the grip he held on my face released, and he stumbled backwards, grasping his nose. I could have sworn that I heard a whimper escape him.
I was going to kill him. Outside, thunder rumbled overhead. The clouds in the sky were stabbed by lightning bolts, bleeding snow onto the earth. One particularly loud burst of electrical energy split the roof of our home in two. The wood of the roof burst into flames. Rich stared up, eyes wide in giddy adulation; he believed his warped perception of God was going to strike me down with one perfectly aimed lightning bolt.
Unfortunately for him, he was very, very misguided in that belief.
Rich propelled himself backwards by rapidly kicking his feet. Each time he scooted away, a bolt of lightning struck the hardwood floor just in front of him. He was narrowly avoiding being fried to a crisp each time. Penny's arms were wrapped around my legs as she watched through her fingers. The fire was beginning to fall around us as the roof caved in. I kicked open the bedroom door to find my father, Maura, and Nick staring, wide-eyed, at us.
“They're my feelings,” My voice conveyed my surprise. “They make things happen...”
“What did you do?!” My father shouted before running into the room where I'm sure Rich was huddled in a corner, praying for my swift demise. The cabin dropped sideways as one of the stilts split in two, sending us all hurtling into the far wall. Nick's body slammed against the window, breaking it open.
“Nick!” I shouted after spinning Penny around so she could attach to my back. I could hear Maura sobbing.
“It's okay!” Nick shouted to me over the blazing inferno that was claiming the cabin. “I'll land on my feet, and you will, too! Come on!”
I looked back at Maura and reached out to her. Tears were falling freely down her face as she looked between my father and me. I was offering her an escape from the torment those people would continue to subject her to as long as she lived. My father was more than likely going to burn to death or die on impact when the cabin crashed onto the pathway below us. I didn't quite see how any deliberation was necessary. The fire engulfing the house and the smoke filling the air didn't aid my patience or understanding. I mentally noted that I would give her a mere ten seconds to make up her mind.
I understood she loved him. I understood she had longed for twenty-plus years to be married to him. But his cruelty had only increased as the years went on. Pangaea was a new chapter for all of us, but for him, it was a clean slate to be dirtied by his relentless need for inflicting pain. She had suffered the worst of his pent-up sadism. I needed her to make a decision before we all met our ends.
“Violet, we have to go!” Penny screamed in my ear.
I still didn't reach out and pull Maura towards me. I would not suffer her resentment later. I would not hear that I had forced her to abandon the love of her life. Maura was always one to point fingers. She was an insolent child when she didn't get her way. If I pulled her out of the burning house, she would tell me later that she had wanted to die with him. I would be the one who ruined her plans, even by saving her life.
Only after she nodded to me and reached out for my hand did I pull her towards me. Without thinking for a minute about the drop or my legs shattering upon impact, we plummeted to the ground.
The phrase “angry mob” is one that so rarely gets used seriously, at least if one is talking about torches burning, guns loaded, nooses tied, the town coroner carting along an empty, wooden coffin, and all of that. In fact, most people never see one like that. However, the crowd coming towards us consisted of people who were practically gnashing their teeth as they shouted about punishment and fiery pits.
“Time to go.” Nick told us. He pulled Penny off of my back and threw her onto his. I kept a firm grasp on Maura's hand as we kicked our way through the knee-high snow. If I didn't calm my fury, their whole village would be buried.
“They're coming! Nick, they're coming!” Penny was shrieking as we ran.
I chanced a glance over my shoulder to find that the mob was closing in. The burning cabin fell away from the mountain before crashing to the earth in a spectacularly loud explosion of wood, flames, and billowing black smoke. Mary Bachum screamed.
“Violet, you have to do something!” Maura urged me as she looked back. “They're getting closer!”
I could feel their monstrous energy. I could feel their thirst for our blood. They would hang all of us from the highest point of their temple. They would sacrifice us with sadistic glee. We were dangers to their way of life. We knew where they were, and we would return with other “mutated freaks” to take them down. They would gladly kill us all, including Penny, who was too young and too innocent to fight or understand.
They would kill Penny. I remembered Tyre talking about sacrificing her to his God. Snowballing from that thought, I remembered in its entirety the conversation Rich and I had just had about all the people he had left to die simply because they hadn’t believed what he and his crazed wife did. Their followers might have just been scared survivors, but they were also incredibly dangerous in their own right. If Rich and Mary pointed, they would swarm a target and rip him or her to pieces. Then, they would drop to their knees and scream their thanks to the heavens as their victim bled out on the ground.
That kind of blind and bloodthirsty devotion was evil, too.
The mountain gave an almighty rumble that sent several more houses tumbling to the ground. We ran even faster to avoid them. I could hear the whooshing of a rushing wave of snow cascading down the mountain towards us.
“RUN!” I screamed over the deafening noise.
We narrowly escaped it. I turned back, huffing and puffing to catch my breath. The avalanche had killed the mob, maybe. It created an impenetrable barrier between us, most certainly.
“So I have to admit, your power is cooler than mine.” Nick told me through his gasps for air.
I smiled slightly, realizing then that I wielded a power far greater than I ever could have imagined. I couldn't wait to tell Brynna and Elijah.
“Well, we don't have to worry about them anymore.”
Something tugged at the giddy excitement I felt at escaping the Bachums' camp. Something Maura had said earlier was playing back to me like a deafening, relentless taunt screamed by children on a playground. I turned to her to find that she was looking off into the distance at the stars twinkling in the now all-clear sky.
“Hey...”
We were all soaking wet from the snow and shivering as the adrenaline died away. Maura, who had not evolved, would be the first to die if someone was meant to be taken that night. I wrapped my arms around her, praying for a surge of warmth that would comfort her. To my immense surprise, heat blazed between us. She turned to me, wrapped her arms around my back and buried her face in my shoulder.
“There was something you said earlier that I need you to tell me now.”
She nodded, knowing what I meant. Her head moved up, and she whispered her secret in my ear. My eyes bugged in terror as I looked up at Nick.
“What?” He was utterly panic-stricken by the expression on my face. “What is it?”
The warmth was extinguished between Maura and I as easily as a quick blow snuffs out a candle. My entire body was shaking but not because of the cold. I struggled to find words. I struggled to make a sound. Her secret was one that was hardly believable, and yet I believed. I knew, the way we just know things, that she wasn't lying.
“What?!” Nick demanded, now walking towards me.
“We have to get to Brynna! I have to tell Brynna!”

Brynna

James’s arms snaked around me as I zipped my jacket onto the girl we had found. From the stunted gasps of cracked, frozen lips, I had learned her story. She and her family had been exiled from the Bachum camp for possessing books and other trinkets deemed morally objectionable. She, her brother, and her mother had survived for two days before a blizzard that came from nowhere claimed their father and forced them to keep trying to move down the mountain. I asked for her name simply so an attempt could be made on my part to comfort her. I couldn’t imagine losing someone I loved in such a brutal, unforgiving stream of events. I couldn’t imagine the permanence of death when Penny and Violet were still missing.
After travailing back down the mountain after my slight emotional hiccup, my mind was hatching circumstances that might explain the abandoned village. The theories ranged from sane to ludicrous, logical to fantastical, all at once, in a tornado of words, pictures, and sounds. I squeezed my eyes shut as I placed the girl down on a bed of half-frozen moss in the forest.
“We need to keep moving.” I told James softly. I felt his jacket being placed around my shoulders and then his perfectly strong arms again.
“I know.” His lips pressed to my shoulder. “It’s still too cold here. They’ll never last the night. We might not even make it.”
I nodded, tensing as the girl laid her head in my lap. She was thirteen at the most and still, I cringed as she desperately attempted to forge a bond with me. I could not afford attachment to any outside party. James, Alice, and Quinn were each another inch of width in the threshold of catastrophe. Any more, and my heart might have spontaneously ceased to beat.
“Be nice.” James whispered to me, “She’s afraid. You’re helping her.”
As quickly as the iceberg had sprung forth from the waters, it melted away into the surrounding mass.  The ocean moved calmly again at James’s command.
“You know we can’t afford this right now.”
The girl slumbering peacefully in my lap was named Ellie. Her little brother, called Oliver, was the same age as Penny. Their mother, who had never regained consciousness even after we had carried her to those slightly warmer temperatures, was named Savannah. The girl would not tell me much about the Bachum camp, though I would surely continue to question her until I had gotten my answers. There was no alternative route anymore; if those strangers knew the Bachums’ secrets, then I would know, too.
“They sent in spies. That’s a tactical maneuver we never could have expected of them.” I told James softly. “We don’t know how many there were. We don’t even know if they are still amongst us. We won’t know how much they know until it’s too late.”
“They’ve already destroyed the house. There’s not much else they can do, is there?”
“They can eradicate us completely while we’re vulnerable. While we’re crawling about, searching for shelter and starving to death, they can hit us. That’s plenty. You may chalk this up to an effort on my part to tailor all of their actions mentally to involve me, but I think that they took Penny and Violet to distract me.”
“Of course they did, baby. But it wasn’t just you. They took so many others. It was a risky move on their part, though. They would either cripple us or piss us off.”
“They’ve done both, I’m afraid. I’m finding it harder to focus. I can’t summon whatever force enables us to fight so efficiently. At least, I can’t summon it as easily. The worry is too great. I can’t stop thinking about what Penny and Violet might be enduring.” I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. “I’m exhausted, but I won’t sleep until they’re safe.”
“That’s not doing them any good, Brynna. You’re right that it’s partially worry; that's why you can't use the change as easily. But you’re tired, and that’s not going to help you or them. Just close your eyes for…”
“No.” I firmly replied. I deserved not a moment of the peace that came with sleep. It would be an insult to my sisters if I allowed myself to relax while they were missing and awaiting my rescue.
“Do you feel them?”  James asked me softly.
I looked back at him, brows crinkled in an expression of aggravated confusion.
“Brynna, your power is that you know things. Use it. Close your eyes and try to feel their presence. Try to feel what they’re feeling. You can do it. I know you can.”
“I don’t think that is how it works, James.”
“Just try.”
I sighed in exasperation at his faith in my power. I was losing my strong trust in the evolution; it was an inconvenience to feel the rushing stream of fear, doubt, regret, and sadness felt by those inhabiting Pangaea. Their thoughts screamed to be heard and sympathized with. My own thoughs and feelings were amplified tenfold by what I heard and felt in others.
A whirring noise drowned out the silence that surrounded James and me. Contorted voices shouted, their words indecipherable. Sobs and beating hearts shook the very foundation of my mind. At the center of the chaos was a glowing light, radiating warmth and tranquil silence. In that soft, beautiful eye of the storm, I could see Penny. Her innocence and inner peace were wrapping around me, a blanket of serene warmth to save me from the cold of the other agonizing emotions.
“I didn’t like them very much. And Brynna will be so happy! Maura is with us again!”
Standing a few feet from her light, Violet was thinking of Nick and the telling of a long-held secret. That particular revelation that stood firmly at the forefront of her mind would rip the ground out from beneath us all. My heart pounded in trepidation as I emerged from the sea of feeling and thought. Only my own mind was screaming.
“They got away.”
“See? I told you. You can do it.” James boasted with an air of jest to his words.
I smiled back at him before whacking him lightly as I always did when his sarcasm took gravity from a situation that warranted grave seriousness.
“They’re very close. Come on!” I pulled him to his feet and turned to Elijah, who was dozing against a tree. “Eli!”
“Yeah?!” His voice bombarded the forest with noise. He looked around wildly, expecting a fight.
“Watch them. Let’s go.” Two commands in one breath was not even a record for me.
“Where are you two going? Do I even want to know?” Elijah called after us.
“Violet and Penny are close!” I called over my shoulder.
“What?!”
“Stay here!”
After going through so much trouble to save Savannah, Oliver, and their mother, one would assume that Elijah would have listened. However, he left Alice and Quinn, both sleeping, to guard the new additions to our merry band.
“What do you mean they’re…?”
But upon breaking through the trees, I saw four and a half shapes trekking towards us, lifting their feet to step through the still melting snow at the foot of the mountain.
“Oh my…” No witty remarks or elaborately formed exclamations could adequately express the relief or the joy. Tears might have sufficed, but then, I was not one for crying, as I am sure you have gathered.
Violet cried enough for the two of us. I did break my code of conduct by kissing her cheek twice, though. I held her so tightly, I thought she would be crushed. The previous twenty-four hours seemed so long, an endless stream of time with only darkness at the end. Every inch of my all-knowing ways could not have predicted the outcome of Violet and Penny being taken. I had been unable to see and thus, I was left to wonder and speculate with only the darkest tools of my mind to mold the future.
And yet there they were, right in front of me. I scooped Penny up, my trembling arms locking around her small body so that no one could take her again. I looked her over before turning my searching gaze to Violet, whom Elijah was now practically suffocating in an embrace. If there was one bruise, even a paper-cut… But there was none.
To call her an elephant in the room metaphorically would be accurate. To call Maura an elephant in the literal sense was far too generous. Her clothes hung from her skeletal frame, reminding me of the gruesome images shown during Health class to warn of the dangers of eating disorders. The bruises that covered her did not spark a rage in me; I felt merely a dim concern. For a moment, I wished that I could feel something towards her. I wished that I could rush to her, inquire about her well-being, and promise her that I would remedy any pain she was feeling. For a moment, I thought those feelings would emerge, but in my mind, I saw her hands flying up to cover her ears. Ice saved me from sympathy.
“You look…” I started to say, but she nodded.
“I know. Are you going to gloat, Brynna?”
Malice was absent from her voice. In fact, when she spoke those words, I heard only quiet pleading.
“Do you think so little of me?” I whispered to her so the others couldn’t hear.
“I left him. I left the life we had built…”
“Don’t get sentimental.” My voice rose one octave from an only slightly gentle whisper to an aggravated hiss. “Look what he’s done to you!”
“It wasn’t him.” She muttered with her eyes fixed below her on the ground.
“Why won’t you look at me?”
“I can’t tell you anything about them, alright?” Her eyes rose to meet mine, and I saw a mirrored image of myself; defiance was staring back at me. “There are good people up there. People that I don’t want to see get hurt…’
“How very noble.” I turned away from her and thought I heard her crying softly.Elijah, despite his earlier anger towards her, swooped in to comfort her, knowing that I could and would not.
“It’s alright. It’s okay.” James told me softly as he squeezed both of my hands. I looked past him, out at the mountain and the surrounding land glowing in the twilight. The greenery was beginning to spring forth from the snow, gasping for the fresh air. I could sympathize with that, surely.
“You don’t owe her anything.” James told me. “Don’t think that you do.”
I nodded.
“Even if there is no debt, we still have to take her with us. We can’t leave her. Any person with a scrap of goodness in their heart deserves a chance, James.”
“I know. Of course we’ll take her with us, baby.”
I heard a shriek of joy behind me, and Alice was flying through the trees, running to Violet and Penny. Violet screamed, too. I had missed the emergence of their friendship, though when I thought back to those peaceful days in the kitchen, I remembered their long talks about typical nonsense. To hear such inane conversation normally provoked an eye roll and a disdainful remark from me about the vapid nature of youth. But in their case, it warmed me to see such normalcy. I wanted them both to be young and happy.
“I almost had an asthma attack chasing you, and they’re really uncomfortable, so don’t ever get taken again.” Quinn told Violet. She giggled raucously in response and returned his warm hug.
There was one person to whom I had not spoken yet. I walked over to Nick and stood on my tiptoes to embrace him. When that awkward moment of warmth expired, I went to pull away immediately.
“Stop being weird.” He told me.
I smiled and held onto him for a minute longer.
“Thank you. From her thoughts, I gathered that you were taking care of her.” I informed him.
“No way. She was taking care of me. It was her grand escape plan.”
“Well, just so you know, she was thinking that she couldn’t have done it without you. I suppose that warrants a pat on the back. So…” I reached back and clapped him on the back once.
“Ow.”
“Pansy.” I grinned and then turned to the group at large. “Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we…”
“…are going to follow Adam back to the city.”
Adam’s appearance was sudden and unwelcome, and why was I still surprised? I jumped when I realized he was standing just in back of me, so close that we were almost touching.
“Back up two steps.” I snapped at him, “I value my bubble.”
“What bubble?” He asked me, sounding blithely amused, which was also quite common for him.
“If you don’t take two steps back, I’ll tell you all about it.”
Don and a group of four others came stomping out of the trees, looking disgruntled.
“You know, you really should tell me when you’re going to take off like that. We almost lost you!”
Don, in typical passive aggressive fashion, scowled at me instead of Adam.
“Hello, Don.” I greeted him with a winning smile of pure taunting. The grin vanished abruptly from my face as I looked back at Adam, rolled my eyes and moved to stand beside James. 
Though it was a doubtful scenario, I was starting to wonder if Adam was, as Violet would put it, “into me.” Surely, a leader of so many who was several thousand years old would have no interest in me. But his subtle glances and his knowing smiles were strange. Perhaps he wanted to kill me, which would be far more desirable a scenario than him coveting my affections. However unlikely, I still made a point of standing beside James when Adam was present so as to make the point crystal clear: James was the man with whom I had chosen to be romantically involved, and that more than likely would not change. Though both men were, if honesty is required, incredibly good-looking, James was also kind, humorous, and, though this is awkward, very skilled at copulating. Adam was nothing more than a warlord who hid in his vast city, manipulating circumstances in the world at large to create the most entertaining spectacle, which he would watch with rabid enthusiasm even as lives were ended violently. In fact, the more violent the deaths, the happier he would be.
But I digress. This is all unimportant.
“Brynna, I need to talk to you.” Violet took my hand and pulled me away from James.
The secret! In my relief, I had forgotten ever learning that there was a revelation to be told.
“What is it? I know there is something significant.”
“It’s more than significant.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. She looked behind me to ensure that no one was eavesdropping. My anticipation grew.
“What is it?” I demanded again.
“Well, I’m sure that you know that the Bachums sent people to spy on us. They sent them so they could attack us from within, you know? And they’ve joined with the other natives. You know, the ones that Adam is fighting...”
“Yes, I know, I know. Now, what is the secret?” My impatience was growing.
“Brynna…” Her hands grasped mine, and her eyes looked behind me again.
“Get up!” A voice shouted, and now, I whipped around.
“Stop!” Violet was screaming and running away from me. Though the sight before us should have erased the questions from my mind and spurred me to immediate action, I still found myself mentally pouting, knowing it would be even longer before I knew the hidden truth she was withholding.
Maura had fallen to the ground, her body weakened from whatever physical abuse she had been forced to endure. Don was pulling her up roughly by her arms, trying to force her to stand. When he finally managed to maneuver her onto her feet, he moved forward so his face was close to hers.
“You’re with him?!” He bellowed in an intimidating show of brutal, verbal force. “You’re with him, and you think we’re going to take you in!? I want to know everything, do you understand?!”
“Put a leash on your dog. A muzzle, too, while you’re at it. We’re trying to have a discussion.” I snapped at Adam as I watched Violet grab hold of Don and throw him off of Maura.
“She’s his wife!” Don had gotten back onto his feet and was pointing an accusatory finger at Maura.
“I left him, didn’t I?” Maura screamed back, but her voice was trembling under the threat of tears.
“She came with us willingly. We didn’t take her.” Nick explained hurriedly in an attempt to help.
“You all know that we can’t just let her come live with us like nothing has happened! For all we know, they wanted you to take her! She could run back to them any time she wants! They know you three trust her!”
“And what would she tell them?” I demanded with a derisive giggle. “I’m sure our forages for berries and roots and our hurried search for shelter will be most pivotal in determining their next course of militaristic action.” I rolled my eyes to the sky, begging for an intervention that would swiftly remedy the stupidity of those individuals around me.
“You’re just mad because of what they did!” Violet proclaimed furiously. “You’re just trying to punish her for what Mary and Rich did to us! It wasn’t her fault, Don! She’s suffered enough! She wants to be on our side now! You’re just trying to make her suffer because Mary and Rich took our people and burned down the house!”
“They killed ten of our people, so yes, I am.” Don replied quickly and curtly. “Now, shut up and get out of the way.”
I zoomed forward in a blur, appearing in front of him before he could even process that I had moved at all. His hands were wrapped around Violet’s wrist, and he had been in the motion of pushing her away from him forcefully. Upon seeing that my fangs had emerged, he immediately let her go.
“You and I do not see eye to eye. That has never yielded favorable outcomes, has it, Don? If you ever touch her again…”
“Brynna, I’m not a spy. I don’t care about this war. I just want it to be over.” Maura was telling me quickly as two of the men cuffed her hands behind her back. “Brynna, please don’t let them do this!”
“What is it that you are planning?” I demanded. “What is it that you think she can tell you?”
“It’s not a matter of her telling me anything. It’s a matter of what she’ll tell them. Weren’t you listening?” Don snapped at me. I chose to ignore his condescension.
“Walk.” One of the men who had cuffed her hands was steering Maura forward.
“There are three others from their camp in the trees. That’s what she just whispered to him!” The woman speaking pointed at Alice, who gasped and covered her mouth. I rolled my eyes again.
“I’m sorry! Brynn, I’m sorry!” Alice uncovered her mouth to apologize but quickly covered it again.
Savannah and Oliver’s mother had regained consciousness. Because she was an adult, they cuffed her hands as well.
“Mama!” Her son screamed, and my heart panged in painful sympathy.
“Please do something!” Ellie was imploring James and me, as though we had extensive control over Don and his lapdogs. I so desperately wished that was the case but alas, it was not.
“I will do what I can for all of you when we arrive where we are headed.” I managed to tell her quickly as two other men pulled her away from me. “Don’t worry, Ellie!”
With one hand, I latched my fingers around James’s. With the other, I ran my fingers through my hair and drew in one deep, trembling breath. There would be blood shed that night and pain experienced by those poor woman for whom I was involuntarily responsible. I had several miles to prepare for that grim reality. My plan would have to be formulated before we reached the city.
Throughout the entire duration of the walk, Violet never stopped screaming at Don. Every couple of minutes, Elijah would threaten him with some painful and degrading consequence, should harm befall any of the prisoners he had taken. Adam sauntered along at the front, looking pleased with himself. Why wouldn’t he be? He had his bloody show.
“Do you think I owe her something now?” I asked after several minutes of silence. When James did not answer, I turned my fiery gaze onto him.
“Yes. But you and I both owe that woman and her children far more.” James told me softly. His grip tightened comfortingly on my hand. Since we were close to the back of the group, I allowed myself a small showing of weakness: I rubbed my head against his shoulder and left it rested there until we had broken through the trees.
I dreaded what might happen in the city for good reason. The end of a time was upon us. A seismic shift in climate was brewing. I watched the last of daylight disappear completely; we were suddenly plunged into darkness so thick, it could only have been symbolic.
By the time the Pangaean sun rose, our world would be in ruins.
***

I was sitting on the other side of a two-way mirror. Apparently, mirror-craft is a universal occupation. I’m afraid that torturous interrogation techniques are also.
Another backhand across Maura’s face left her silent. She had been crying, begging to see Violet, who, as she claimed, would explain everything.
“You’re his wife! You can’t convince me that you don’t know anything, Maura!” Don bellowed at her. Even from outside, the volume of his voice rattled my eardrums. My hands were on my face, my fingers massaging the center of my forehead. I noted briefly that I was trembling.
“There’s nothing you could have done. If they exiled us, we would have nowhere to go. We tried to live on our own when we first got here. Every day, there was something else. We can’t do it, Brynn.” James tried to reassure me softly. In his voice, I heard no true dedication to the words he was speaking. His excuses did not register, even to him.
“I can’t sit by and allow this.” I told him. “There is never a reason for a man to raise his hand to a woman. I am sure I have told you my feelings on the matter many times.” I stood and turned away from the sight. “And right now, what they’re doing is just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows where it will end? Well, of course, I do. I do not see a course out of this where she lives, James.”
I hadn’t spoken the words out loud. I hadn’t told the grim truth to Elijah, whom I could hear shouting enraged promises of violence out in the hallway or Violet, who was sobbing openly. I hadn’t told Alice and Quinn, who were upstairs, trying to rally together a makeshift protest.
“She doesn’t deserve to die.” I told James.
 In those terrible moments of the purest, most desperate terror and the most disgusting degradation all those years ago that Maura had allowed to happen by promoting her own interest over mine, I never thought that I would ever say later that she deserved her life. As I stood, watching her succumb to such heinous torment, I knew that I could not allow it to continue.
“I have to go to Adam. He can stop this. He pulls the strings, James.”
“No.” James told me firmly. “I don’t know what he wants exactly, but by the way he looks at you, it’s not in your best interest.”
“I don’t care! He’s helped me before without giving me a debt to pay.”
“You only think that he didn’t give you a debt to pay. What are you talking about? When did he help you? Was it when he blithely informed you that you needed that plant to save Quinn? Was it when he showed up on the mountain when you were freezing to death? He’ll call your debt any day now, Brynna. He is sick. He’s meticulous, too. He will play any angle he has to, as long as he gets what he wants from you. The more you ask of him, the higher the price.”
“James, I believe you are over-reaching just a tad.”
“I'm not!” James exclaimed before rubbing his eyes as he gathered his thoughts. “It's the way he looks at you, Brynna. I can't stand it. It makes me sick! Every time I see him look at you, my skin crawls.”
“Is that what this is about?” I pulled his hand away from his face gently. “James, I love you. You know that my feelings towards him border very closely on absolute loathing...”
“I don’t know what he wants from you, Brynna, but I know that you’re in his debt. He’s saved your life before. He saved you…” He trailed off, remembering the terrible instance involving the Peace Fruit.
“We cannot have this conversation now, James. Later, we can discuss it for hours, if you feel so inclined. Adam is the only person who can stop Don. I am going to make him do just that.”
“Then you’ll owe him again! Brynna, you cannot play games with him. We have seen what he can do. We know what he wants from all of us. You think he’ll cut you loose from your obligations to him just because you can talk quickly and negotiate well? He doesn’t negotiate! And you can’t outsmart him. Look at how long he’s been around.”
“What do you recommend, James? Short of killing Don, the only course of action that will result in a favorable outcome would be going to Adam for help. He saved Violet and asked for nothing in return. That was the most crucial instance of him helping me. Surely, that instance would designate the highest payment, given how deeply I care for her. If he were going to ask for his payment, I believe he would have done so by now.”
James sighed and put both hands on his face. After a long moment, he exclaimed in frustration.
“You’re smarter than this, Brynna!” He accused me furiously. “You know it’s only a matter of time. Are you afraid of what he might ask you for? Is that why you refuse to admit that you owe him?”
“What purpose does it serve to you or anyone else if I admit that I owe him something? This conversation is redundant and therefore pointless, so I am exiting it now.” 
I strode away, but he caught up to me. He wrapped me in his arms and held me tightly against him. I frowned when I felt him kiss the back of my head. His sudden show of affection confused me. I could not understand the sudden change in his mood.
“What are you doing? Am I meant to succumb to your embrace and forget what I have resolved to do?” I asked condescendingly, though my hand did reach back over my shoulder to touch his face. “Is that your plan? Because I must tell you that that plan actually succeeding is less likely than hell becoming the new Aspen.”
“I lied to you, Brynna.”
His voice was quiet, but his tone was resolute. I prayed that I had not heard him correctly, but his tone cruelly assured me that I had. Dread seemed to take him as he prepared to say out loud whatever it was that he had kept from me. In his heart, I sensed the excruciating realization that in mere moments, I would no longer wish to be with him. I would be the one who walked away when I had so tormented myself over picturing that scenario reversed.
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve lied to you about something very serious. I should have told you from the moment I met you. When you asked me about it, I should have been honest. I just want to apologize for that now.”
“Well, I am certainly not going to accept your apology without knowing exactly what the nature of the lie is!” I shook my way out of his embrace, “You know that I do not tolerate liars, James! What have you not told me?”
“I had a wife.”
Somehow, that was disappointing. Just as I had geared my adrenal system into overdrive, preparing for his bombshell and the outburst of rage that would follow such a stunning betrayal of truth and honesty, he had revealed something that I could have easily guessed.
“Honey, that’s,” I shook my head as I tried to mentally gather how he could believe that such a revelation was angering. “I know that I asked whether you had been married before…”
“No, listen,” He grasped both of my hands and looked into my eyes. “I had a wife. She and I, given our careers, knew about Adam. We knew about his people. We had met him long before he ever came to camp that night. Brynna, he was on Earth.”
“For what?” I asked quickly. A grimace was working to emerge on my face as the slow bloom of that festering secret spread bitter, metallic ooze over my tongue and rendered me nearly unable to speak. Something earth-shattering was going to be revealed to me now by him. Violet’s secret…
“He was looking for people like us. He was looking for people who saw the end. He was looking for people who were starting to show signs of the evolution.”
“For what?” I asked again.
“I don’t like the way you’re saying that.” He told me softly as he ran his hand over his head. “It’s a little unnerving.”
“I could not care less about that. Continue talking now.”
“At first, he wanted to take us himself. He and his people wanted to study us, because they didn’t know how it was possible that we could have powers when some others here, meaning Tyre’s group, had lost theirs. Obviously, those of us who knew about this were completely against that. So, we found our own way.”
“What does your spouse have to do with this?”
Now, my head was spinning. Now, I was beginning to feel the urge to run. I did not want to hear any more. I was pacing back and forth, running my fingers through my hair and struggling to breathe normally. Behind me, behind that thick wall with the two-way mirror implanted dead in the center, Maura screamed again and cried out for my father.
“I don’t know! I’m sorry!” She cried desperately. “Please, Don…”
“You had better arrive at the point right this second, James! What common link is there between your wife, your previous association with Adam, and my current predicament?”
“My wife and I were over for a long time before the event. We had an open marriage, to say the least. When I realized that the world was ending, and I saw your face in my dream, I knew that I had to go to you. I had to get you and your family onto the ship. My wife disagreed.”
“DON! STOP!” Maura pleaded through her loud, trembling sobs. My heart pumped blood rapidly into my ears; the liquid flooded my brain and blocked out James's face and his words only momentarily. I was running out of time. Maura's life was beginning to slip from the current stream of souls inhabiting Pangaea into an unknown realm that I would never know...
“We fought over it.” James was saying. “It wasn’t just that. There were so many other things we were screaming at each other about, I don’t even remember them all. Something came over me. You know what it is. You’ve experienced it, that killing instinct. And I… I…”
The end to his story was clear. His stammering avoidance of saying the words was proof enough that he had killed his wife. When I grasped his scratchy, stubble-covered cheek, his eyes darted all around to avoid mine. For only a shuddering minute in time, I saw his tears of regret.
“I’m sorry.” I whispered to him. I stood on my tiptoes so I could press my forehead to his. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“To me? How can you feel sorry for me? I killed her, Brynna. I deserve whatever bad happens to me from here on out. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve for you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now. Don’t you see that?”
“I see very clearly. I see in your heart a guilt too painful to imagine. You might not have loved her anymore, but you loved her once. You were not aware that you possessed such strength. You could not have stopped yourself.”
“And if I push you the way I pushed her, and you fall like that…”
I shushed him gently and grasped both of his arms. I pulled them so they encased me. Then, I gently eased his head onto my shoulder, realizing that he was crying only when his few tears ran down my neck. He never made a sound.
“Goddamn it, I’m losing my man-card.” He told me sarcastically as he pulled away from me, swiping at his eyes.
“Stop it.” I grasped his hands.
“I’m surprised you’re not breaking this off right now, given how much you hate emotions.”
“I couldn’t break this off just because you shed a few tears. Now, if you start sobbing loudly and screaming for help at the heavens, I might consider it.” We both chuckled softly. “Now, tell me how Adam fits into all of this.”
His eyes did not darken. His face did not contort into an expression of desire to suppress the secret. Everything simply went blank. I realized then that the worst of his story had not yet been told. Now, I would learn the true details that would shatter what we had built. Now, I would know what it was that he had kept from me.
“Adam showed up. He must have just known what I had done. I was going to call the police and turn myself in. But he stopped me. He talked me down, told me that it was the evolution. Then, he got rid of her body. By then, I thought that maybe he was alright. Maybe I had judged him wrong. He had helped me without asking me for anything in return.”
“But I suspect that he did ask for something in return.”
“Yeah, he did. Brynna, he…” James grasped both of my hands again.
“What? Say it, James.” I broke my hands out of his grip and raised his head so he was looking at me again.
“He wanted you.”
By now you know that Adam wanted me. My father had kindly pointed that out. Adam's behavior betrayed his great interest in me. I knew that somehow, his intentions were not completely malevolent. However, being desired for any reason by a man as old, powerful, and bloodthirsty as he was certainly provoked great fear inside of me. I am not ashamed to admit that, even now.
“Why?” I closed my eyes as I attempted to stop the suddenly quickened pace with which Pangaea spun on its axis.
“I didn't know then. I knew about the Shadows, but I didn't know about the Reapers. When Adam sent them with me, they were supposed to be making sure that I held up my end of the deal. When I didn't...”
“You went to the bar that night knowing that you were supposed to turn me over to him?!” I exclaimed as I whipped around to face him. “At that point, you were still planning on giving me to him?!”
“I was, but only until I saw you, Brynna! After that, I knew that I couldn't do it. I saw you, and everything changed. Everything, Brynna.”
“I heard that same thought in your head weeks ago, and I naively believed that it was some sweet sentiment regarding your love for me changing your life. God or Gods, that was so stupid on my end! I almost deserve this for being so blinded by my love for you!”
“You don't deserve this, Brynna. I am so sorry, and…”
“So why didn't Adam kill you after you failed to come through on your obligation to him?”
“He said that I got you to the planet, and that was enough for him at that moment. But he said that eventually...”
“Stop pausing and just tell me what you need to tell me, James!” I shouted in fury.
“Eventually, I was going to have to give you up to him.”
“And what did you say?! Please tell me that you said you wouldn't! Please tell me that you told him we were together, and he could go to hell! Even if you referred to me in possessive terms, meaning that you said I was yours, just tell me that you told him he couldn't have me, James!”
His silence was resounding. The answer to such a terrible question had never been more painfully clear. I staggered back a step, my hand coming up to cover my mouth and my eyes widening as I turned away. I did not doubt that he was being completely honest. Only the truth could be so vile. My arms wrapped around my middle and my hands squeezed two fistfuls of my sweatshirt in their grip tightly. The precious Pangaean air could not find an open passage into my body; my head spun, and I was forced to reach out and grab a hold of the wall to steady myself.
Vertigo is rendered inert by touching a firm, unmoving object, I reminded myself. But that old trick was proved to be false. My legs collapsed from underneath me and only James's arms could right the frantic movement of my brain tossing about from side to side in my head.
“Don't touch me...” I whispered fiercely, struggling to break his grip on me.
“I'm sorry, Brynna. I'm so sorry.”
“Don't touch me!” My voice rose to a forceful scream. “Just tell me what it is that he's going to give you in return for me! Just tell me so that I can, at the very least, know exactly how valuable the reward is for my life!”
“He said he'd let me keep my immortal life.”
I found myself laughing, covering my mouth as though he had just delivered some sarcastic response to one of my quips.
“So, a reward of no value at all. That's discouraging...” I turned away from him, cringing at his attempts to touch me.
“Just let me tell you everything. Brynna, I'll explain everything, I promise. And then you can yell and scream and hit me, if it will make it right. Whatever you need me to do to put it right, I’ll do it.”
From the third step leading to the floor above us, I looked back at him, shaking my head.
“I have heard all that I wish to hear, James. There are no hidden motives behind what you did. To put it quite simply, you were too much of a coward to do what you were told. You couldn't turn me over to Adam because you knew that your guilt would end your life.”
“That's not true, baby.” He was standing at the bottom of the stairs now, imploring me to see his side of the story. Stubbornly, I refused to be swayed by his pleading eyes or his words that sought but failed to explain.
“I love you, Brynna.” He told me uselessly.
“You don't. Forgive my childish sentiments regarding love, but from what I have read, the state of being generally denotes a willingness to die for the one whom your affections are directed. Clearly, that is not reality. I don't know how long it was going to be before he came to kill you, but I know that you would have given me to him then. Am I correct in that assumption? Don't answer that!” I changed my mind quickly and squeezed my eyes shut to block out his handsome face. “I am resolved now not to care. Whatever you and I had is over, James.”
“Brynna, I should have told you all of this before now...”
“I now understand my inability to understand all of those books I read in which love was the key arc of the story.” I replied, more to myself than to him. “I was simply too intelligent to believe such things exist. For a while, with you, I did believe in that. Now, I understand again that such beliefs are downright ridiculous. How very interesting, when life comes full circle...”
“Stop. You're doing that to avoid feeling this. Just let me explain it to you, Brynna. If you wanted to walk away, you would have done it by now. You love me. You know I love you so much, baby. I will tell you everything you want to know, I promise.”
“I know everything already, James. In fact, I think I know it more than you do. I know that you would have traded my life for yours with great hesitation. I know that in time after that, you would have reasoned away your guilt. I would have been nothing but a distant memory to you, some uncomfortable presence in your mind that brought about a dull ache in your heart...”
“That's what I thought would happen, but that's not...”
“Your lies baffle you, James. You are blinding yourself to them.”
I was offering dull, lifeless retorts to every point he presented to me. If I felt the pain of his betrayal there, even for the quickest of milliseconds, I would crumple to the ground, screaming, sobbing, and pleading with him to tell me that he was lying, that it was all just a cruel joke. I am sure that this goes without saying by now, but I would not beg him or anyone else for anything.
“Brynna, you know... you know I love you. Somewhere, you know that. Stay with me, baby. I'll tell you everything. Just don't end this. I can explain this to you...”
Maura's shriek of pain raised the hair on the back of my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut and broke free from his grasp, fighting the tremor of fright that passed through me at the thought of her time running out.
“I understand this far better than you do.” I told James in hurried anger. “Do not condescend me by implying that I need an explanation from you. Goodbye, James.”
His arms locked around my middle, and he held me to him.
“It's over, so let go of me. There is nothing you can say.” I told him firmly, “God or Gods, I cannot process this. I cannot understand it.” I told him firmly as my throat tightened under the threat of tears. “I love you so much that this baffles me, James! It strangles every ability I have to understand! God or Gods, what have you just done to me? What have you done to me?”
Never have words from my lips betrayed such great sadness. Or fear. Or regret. Never have words from my lips been more resolute. More final. More strangely cold and paradoxically unfeeling…
Even after I was alone in the hallway above where we had stood, I did not cry. My heart wrenched painfully downwards, though, pulling me forward so I had to steady myself once again. I moaned softly as my fingernails clawed into my chest. I was struggling to remain on my feet, whimpering softly but shedding not a single tear.
I did not want James's explanation because his lies would torment me into madness. Maybe, after I had slipped away into a world populated only by insane, smothering delusions, I would accept those lies and excuses to be factual representations of a fabled truth. I knew, deep down in my soul where those dark, unwelcome feelings lurked, that if I allowed him to speak, he would convince me. My love for him would flare up in an effervescent display of sparks that were fueled by that warmth that erupted inside of me every time I looked at him and my own stupid, pathetically idealistic, disgustingly sentimental youth. His spell consumed me, wrapping me tightly in a snug blanket and keeping me safe from the world and myself, too. If I listened to his voice for even a moment, I would only be hypnotized once again.
There was but one person with whom I needed an audience, and I sensed his presence growing nearer and nearer to me. In a hurried movement, I ran up the hallway, searching for the grand puppeteer himself. In a quick moment of Seeing, I could hear his thoughts.
He was searching for me, as well. He sensed my pain, my weakness. The hunter's disciple had failed to secure the prey. Now, he was closing in for the kill himself while the wounded creature hobbled away desperately. Only I was not going to run. Nothing was going to stop me from procuring the answers I was so wildly pursuing.
If I would not accept the truth from James, I would be forced to accept whatever story Adam told me. With that in mind, I ran in the direction of his blurry thoughts.
***

“I can sense that you wish to speak to me.” He told me apathetically as he leaned against the wall and observed the ceiling. Elijah and Violet were in the room, looking between the two of us in concern and curiosity.
“Yes.” I replied with a glare in their direction. “Alone, if you please.”
“I do please.” Adam replied, raising his eyebrows. His eyes snapped over to Elijah, who had just opened his mouth to speak. “I have no intention of harming her, Mr. Olivier. Though I do find your protective nature quite admirable. You are the perfect brother, and I mean that in all sincerity.”
“Shut up and walk.” I hissed at him, angered that he would openly address one of my siblings.
“Oh, ‘bossy.’ Is that not what men call powerful women where you are from?”
We walked through the door adjacent to the hallway where my brother and sister were whispering amongst themselves, wondering what exactly had occurred between James and me. Elijah did not understand, as I gathered from his loud thoughts, how two people who loved each other so very much could find a reason to separate. Violet knew the truth, as it had been her secret, after all. Her heart broke perhaps even more severely than my own; she had loved James and been so happy that I had found him.
I shook my head back and forth quickly, expelling their voices from my mind. Adam beckoned to the chair that I hadn't realized I was grasping. The wooden backing had splintered beneath my firm grasp.
“Sit.” He instructed. Though his tone was gentle, anything but commanding, I still scowled at him.
“Do I look like a dog to you?” I shot at him in quiet yet potent irritation. I raised my voice only after he grabbed my shoulders. “Let go of me!”
He maneuvered me around the chair with ease before gently sitting me down.
“You are far too beautiful to ever be confused with a canine, my dear Brynna. However, at the moment, you could be confused with an apparition. If I did not know better, I would assume that I was being visited by some grieving soul’s dearly departed loved one.”
“I am very tired, Adam.” I whispered. My defenses were rebuilding, and yet in those words, the foundation took a hard kick. I was admitting weakness. I was admitting an exhaustion far beyond anything that was strictly physical.
“I know. You are also quite thin. You need a full meal and a full night of rest.”
“No. What I need requires your assistance.”
A grin tugged at the corners of his lips. He blocked the smile by spreading his fingers to lazily cover his mouth. Under my scorching glare, he resumed his normal expression of curious amusement.
“I apologize. Males are all built the same no matter where we are from. I took your words as containing a suggestive undertone, and I do apologize.”
My face was in my hands. With the tips of my fingers, I massaged the center of my forehead, hoping to disperse the blinding pain that had centered there abruptly.
“Ms. Olivier, I am very sorry. I know you are not in the mood for jesting.”
“You are right. Just be quiet until I ask a question that requires an answer.”
“Alright.”
“Why am I so important that you would send James after me?”
“You are the last of your kind.” He answered with no hesitation. “The All-Knowings, or Athenes, as they are more elegantly called, were eradicated several hundred years ago. I knew that humans were being gifted with powers. While I found this change in your original kind to be very interesting, albeit very befuddling, Tyre was furious, to the say the least.”
“Why?”
“Because he and his people have long since lost their powers. They feel that the one God chose a race of inferiors over his.”
“Why did they lose their powers?”
“Do you truly think so highly of me that you believe I know His intentions?”
“That is sarcasm and your pathetic attempt at charm.” I rubbed my eyes again, exasperated already.
“I do apologize.”
“I do not accept. But that's moot right now, okay?”
“Alright. I do so love your use of the word 'moot.'”
My eyes glared into his.
“Another apology.” He said with a trace of a smile. My eyes were sure to remain permanently stuck looking up to the sky, as many times as I had rolled them that evening.
“How long have you known that James went rogue?”
“'Went rogue?' What does that mean? I am sorry, I am still becoming accustomed to Earthean phrases and figures of speech.”
“Let me rephrase my question: How long have you known that James broke his promise to you?”
“Ah, yes. Understood. I visited your planet several times over the thousands of years since we left. When I commanded James Maxwell to deliver you to me, it was only a week or so before the event that claimed your Earth. He told me that he would not fulfill his duty only after you had arrived, and I found him in the forest. Once there, he told me that he needed more time. He succeeded in one thing, at least. When the Reapers were tracking you, he was meant to protect you from them. He did so quite masterfully. Credit where credit is due, I suppose...”
I was silent, every part of my inner being stinging painfully. I had always believed grief to be the most painful of all emotions, followed closely by regret, guilt, and nostalgia, in that order. However, betrayal had hopped over all to take the top spot on my list. Not only had James been sent to abduct me, but he was not even enough of a man to do it. He employed those terrible creatures that he then killed to protect me. It was all so mind-boggling. I was not used to the state of confusion. I was not used to being unable to connect all the dots.
“Are you still with me, my dear?”
“Don't call me that.”
“Once again, I apologize. This is a first for me. Apologizing so many times, that is. You have quite an interesting effect on me, Ms. Olivier.”
“Would you just call me Brynna?” I whispered as I pulled my face away from my hands.
“May I take it as a compliment that you are allowing me to call you by your first name?”
“If you take me allowing you to call me by my first name as a compliment, will that boost your already far over-inflated ego?”
“Indeed.”
I covered my mouth discreetly, trying to hide the tiny, almost nonexistent smile that was struggling to emerge. He was so annoyingly arrogant and composed about everything. I was moving past irritation at both of those things and into a place where they were beginning to entertain me. A part of me believed his attitude was meant to do just that. If that were the case, he was skilled at pretending to be completely serious.
“I know that you are attempting to suppress a smile. I would like you to know that I am pleased to have brought about such a change in your state of mind.”
I furrowed my brows and shook my head ever so slightly.
“You are so weird.”
He chuckled softly, his eyes alight with humor.
“I could say the very same about you. I know that many already have. Please, continue. You are asking all the right questions and by now, you deserve the answers.”
There was so much more to be asked, so I obliged.
“When was the last time that you and James spoke about me?”
“Another excellent question. It was just three days ago.”
Hello, boot. Meet stomach. I bent over again and buried my face in my hands. Then, I rested my head against my knees. God or Gods, betrayal hurt. I was sickened that James had been so close to me in every possible way. I could not stand the burning, stinging, stabbing pain in my heart. I was almost sweating as my body sought to exorcise the emotional torment. Never before had I fallen for such a charade and yet now, James had made a fool out of me. His lies were endless. I would never forgive myself for believing them.
Adam leaned forward and delicately placed his hand on my back.
“Look at me.”
“No.”
“Alright. Do you have any more questions?”
“Why is my gift so powerful? Why is it so important to you?”
I did look up at him again. My eyes would stay fixated on his so that if a lie flickered across his face, I would detect it immediately. That arrogant smile vanished from his face. He leaned forward and grasped my hands. When I struggled to pull them away, fearing that he would feel the dampness of my palms, he only grasped them tighter.
“I do not want you to fear me. I have no intention of harming you in any way. If you agree to help me, I will protect you. If you align with me, I will be willing to sacrifice my own life in order to keep you and the people you hold dear safe. Is that understood?”
“You did not answer my question.”
Now I needed to know what duties he would require of me, if I were to align completely with him. More importantly, I needed to know how I could help destroy our opposition. The war could distract me from my agonizing thoughts about James. The hurt was throbbing inside of me, birthing an all too familiar beast: Rage. I had never taken any hit, physical or emotional, without hitting back harder and with better aim. The current state of things would amplify that tendency ten-fold.
“Why is my ability to know things so important to you, Adam?”
“Because you can see things, Brynna.” He answered solemnly. “You can feel what is to come. You can determine a person's true self with little effort. You can read their innermost thoughts. Not to mention your vast knowledge on all things, small and large. Your power is invaluable. That is why Tyre, Rich Bachum, and your father want you dead. That is why I want you alive.”
“So, if I stay here with you, what will you ask of me?”
“Nothing as worrisome as what I am sure you are imagining. Merely your opinion, which I have discovered you are not shy about sharing.”
I nodded, unable to decipher whether he was being honest or lying to me shamelessly. Even staring intently into his eyes did not answer that question. It didn't matter, at least not in that particular moment.
“And if I refuse?” I asked.
He shrugged and smiled slightly.
“No matter what you decide, welcome to Lumiere.”
“What is that?”
“The name of the city.”
I nodded and gazed into his intriguing eyes once again.
“I have a favor to ask of you. I will owe you a debt if you oblige.”
“That is a dangerous thing to say, Brynna. I am a man who never allows a debt to go unpaid.”
“I am well aware of that. I sensed that in you the day we met.”
It was true. The day my eyes had first met his, when he had appeared like a long dead ghost from the darkness of the forest, I had sensed in him great power and brutal strength, first and foremost. But behind all of that, I sensed a man with an unrelenting grasp on all that was around him, including those who owed him.
“And still, you wish to say such a thing?” He asked almost breathlessly. “That is foolishness far below you.”
“Foolish or wise, it does not matter. I'm sure you already know exactly what I am going to ask.”
“I can assure you that I do not, though I have theories.”
“Well, allow me to confirm one of them: I want Don to let Maura go. Though she and I will never be on sufficiently comfortable terms, she is very important to my sisters and brother.”
Saying the words out loud relieved their burden. I had openly acknowledged, at last, that the bad blood, as they call it, between Maura and I would never evaporate. We would never be what we once were. I did not hate her. In fact, I pitied her. Sometimes, a feeling hovers deep in the core of one's being, and no name can be given to it. It is simply a discomfort unlike any felt before. It is a mixture of terrible betrayal, dull hurt, and in contrast, devastating numbness. The three coexist simultaneously, none fighting for prevalence or longevity. They know they will survive for all time, like tumors immune to all medicine. Maura had provoked that feeling in me, and yet I did not wish for her to die. Somewhere, very deep down, cowering in the face of my still very alive and very powerful anger, was love for her. That love, if you can believe it (and I know I barely do), carried great strength.
Adam was studying me, searching my face for an answer to some question he would not pose.
“Short of killing Don, there was only one other option. I had to come to you and ask for her to be spared.”
“Yes.”
I looked up at him.
“Yes?” I questioned. “Is that an affirmative in response to my statement, or are you telling me that you will stop him?”
“Both. Donald listens to me. He knows the consequences will be severe if he does not. And yes, I will stop him.”
I nodded and reached out suddenly to grasp his hands. I didn't know why, but the touch between us sent a calming breeze through me, so very different from what I had experienced with James. Though the feelings were both undeniably pleasurable, they were so complex in their differences. James had sent warmth through me. Adam sent a soothing chill. Fire and ice, so to speak...
I snapped out of my thoughts and looked up at him. He had leaned closer to me suddenly, pulling one of his hands from my grasp so he could place it on my face. Only a deep seriousness was etched into every smooth line of his face. In the hypnotizing glow of his eyes that was so reminiscent of the way the sun cast that serene, surreal light through the tree canopy of the Pangaean forest, I saw both a hunger to continue whatever it was we were doing and a warning to me that I needed to pull away. It was a look of pure torture, perfect evidence that beneath all of his arrogance, there was a self-loathing to rival my own. Adam and I were so incredibly similar. That similarity stunned both of us and drew us closer together as though our very cores were magnetized.
I had never needed a man before, and I still didn't. My heart was, admittedly, shattered by James's betrayal. To completely renounce what I stated earlier, I will say that above all feelings, vulnerability is the absolute worst. Betrayal breeds it in abundance. Because of how exposed I felt by what James had done, I was allowing myself to drift closer to Adam when I should have been running with wild, reckless speed in the opposite direction. Adam had been the one to send James, and surely, he deserved a large percentage of my wrath. But Adam had not slept beside me every night, telling me he loved me more than his own life and promising never to lie to me. Though Adam could protect me, I needed to prove once again that I could take care of myself. With those thoughts in my mind, I pulled away from him, trying not to cringe as the ice that had pacified my demons melted away. In the flood it left, the worst parts of me sprung up, gasping for air after being submerged. I deserved such a terrible feeling. I hoped it would serve as a reminder to me that I needed to keep my distance from Adam and anyone else who sought to protect and coddle me.
“Before you run off, berating yourself for allowing that moment of humanity, let me say this: James made another deal with me after he ran from your campsite. I told him that should you two find one another, he was to protect you by whatever means necessary. Because he did not do as I ordered the first time, I was ready to kill him. He made another deal with me for his life like the coward that he is.”
“Is that meant to reassure me, Adam?” I asked softly with no edge to my voice.
“No, but this will: He loves you and his feelings on the matter have changed substantially. Three days ago, when we spoke, he told me to kill him. He said he would rather die than trade you. Yet I could not abide by his wish. I could not end his life.”
“Why?” I whispered after swallowing hard to contain the headstrong tears that so boldly wished to fall.
“Because I see in your eyes every time you look at him, and right now, also, how very much you love him. I cannot hurt you, Brynna, in any sense. I might not agree with your choice of man. I believe that you can do far better. But it is your choice.”
“What were the new terms of your deal?” I asked, somewhat randomly. “The one you made the last time you two spoke?”
“I told him that if he keeps you safe, I will not kill him. As long as you are alive, his debt to me is paid. It was the same deal as the second. It is the only one that truly matters. I simply want what is best for you, Brynna.”
“Why is that?” My eyes gazed intently into his, and I even leaned forward slightly in anticipation of his answer. “What am I to you, besides someone who possesses a power that you feel will guarantee you a victory in your war?”
He smiled and laughed softly; the sound embraced my ears warmly and forced a small shudder to run up and down the length of my tired body.
“That is the reason. You most certainly do know all, my dear Brynna.”
I do not know what exactly it was that I thought he would say in response to my last question. Perhaps I conceitedly believed that he truly did have feelings for me and that he would admit them outright. The way he wielded his charisma and dry humor in my presence led me to think that he wanted more from me than just the services my power could offer. But now, he had affirmed that my power was all he needed. There was no secret lust for me, as my brain had led me to believe, for whatever surely unnecessary reason.
“Such interesting thoughts. They are very loud.”
I jumped up, shaking my head back and forth and covering my ears.
“If you can read minds, why do you need me to do it for you?”
“Your thoughts tend to scream. You feel things very strongly, which does not surprise me. You are able to share your thoughts with others. That is another aspect of your power. I can hear them because a part of you wants me to hear them.”
I was tempted to loudly exclaim about the excrement of a bull in obscene terms. Instead, I just shook my head and turned away from him. I searched my mind for an insult or statement that would successfully deflate his arrogance. But I was very tired and unable to fashion one that was both creative and intricate. I had to settle on one that obviously betrayed my great exhaustion.
“Whatever you say, you audacious prick. Now, would you please honor your end of our agreement?”
His soft laughter followed me even after I had left the room.
***

Maura was in tremendous pain. Violet and Elijah sat by her side, dabbing the blood from her wounds, the sweat from her forehead, and the tears that fell freely from her eyes with cold water wrung into a rag. I stood outside of the door, leaning against the frame and smoking, pondering all that had occurred to the tune of Maura's sobs. Slowly, I began to sympathize with her. Just as that thought raised its voice to an audible volume, I heard her:
“Brynna!” She called.
I furrowed my brows and looked into the room. For hours, she had cried for Elijah and Violet. Because he was old enough to handle the emotional strain of seeing our second mother in such a state, I had not stopped Elijah from taking his place at her bedside. Besides, she needed his medical expertise; her wounds were severe, and the pain grew worse every hour. Violet, on the other hand, fought me endlessly when I stopped her from entering the room. Finally, I relented, tired of fighting with her, tired of fighting at all.
“There was no reason for your violence towards her. You were simply attempting to eradicate your feelings of inadequacy. I hope you know that. I hope you realize that you and your friends beat and tormented a woman in order to feel like men.” I told Don scathingly in an effort to ignore Maura's pleas for me. After a few moments, she went silent.
“Brynna...” 
In Violet's soft cry, I heard a plea for my merciful repentance. I heard her wish for me to enter the room and comfort Maura. I heard her beg for a small touch of normalcy inside my intricate being, for a part that cared for others without being held firmly in opposition by the ghosts of the past.
I ignored her, too.
“This is counterproductive.” Don muttered back to me as he rubbed his eyes.
“What is? You torturing Maura or our current conversation?”
“Both. Maybe I did do it for the reasons you're saying. Maybe you're right about that. I'm a big enough man to admit that, and doesn't that count for something?” He looked up at me.
“I suppose. However, it does not reverse the life-threatening wounds you and your thugs inflicted on her. It does not undo the toll her fear has taken on her body. If you could successfully reverse those, then I would consider us square.” 
The smoke I exhaled cast a haze between us that hid his expression.
“Can I be frank with you?”
“I suppose. I do love honesty, however brutal.”
“This isn't brutal. It's an observation and a proposition.”
“How interesting.” I replied apathetically.
“You love her. I don't know what happened between the two of you, but you need to realize that it's obvious. There is bad blood there, definitely. But you wouldn't have brought her to Pangaea if you didn't feel some level of affection for her. While I don't feel guilty for what I did because of who she is, who she's married to, I do know that there more than likely was a different way to go about it.”
“Of course there was. There were many paths you could have taken. Unfortunately, you chose the darkest one. I think you should ponder exactly what that says about you. Though, spoiler alert, what it says is not good.”
“Would you just be quiet and listen for a second? You told me that you and I don't see eye to eye, and that is very true. I believe that force is necessary and sacrifices must be made. You don't.”
“No, I don't disagree that force and sacrifices are necessary. You and I differ on when force should be utilized and which sacrifices are worth making. On the subject of sacrifice, we disagree as to which are morally acceptable.”
“Brynna Olivier, I thought you shunned morality.” There was a lightness to his voice that I had not heard in many months.
I looked over at him, smiling slightly.
“I never said that, either. What is it that you are asking me, Don? I am unable to decipher it at the present time as I am now entering my third day without sleep. My exhaustion hinders my ability to comprehend even something as simple as your true intentions.”
“You must be. Generally, you know what I am trying to say even when I don't.”
“Are you complimenting me? Is that meant to advance the likelihood of me accepting whatever proposition it is that you refuse to say out loud?” I scratched the end of my cigarette against the concrete wall and watched the rain of sparks fall to the ground.
“Yes. But that shouldn't suggest that I'm not being honest. And my proposition is that I need someone to bounce ideas off of. I need someone to help me figure out what I'm supposed to do. I know you have never really trusted me, though I have tried to gain your trust. Brynna, I need for us to put our differences aside. I didn't want to become their leader, if you can even call me that. I don't even like to use that word. I need you to trust me when I say that when this all began, all I wanted was to keep people safe, and once we were safe, to keep us alive.”
“I trust that wholeheartedly, Don. Power corrupted you as it has corrupted many men and women far greater than both you and me. It sounds now, though, that you are resurfacing. You are coming back to your senses. Otherwise, you would not be asking for help.”
“I am asking for help. Brynna, I'm asking you to be my second-in-command.”
I nodded again and looked up at him; I had seen who Don truly was a handful of times before. I had seen a man who possessed the will and ability to protect others. Our time at the house, though there had been hiccups both minimal and severe, had been the most peaceful and productive time we spent on Pangaea. With my help, we could avoid those problems that had been faced and as a result, actually stand a chance of winning the war against the Bachums. I could mold him to see as I saw: The other side could not all be killed, for they were not all bad people. They were scared survivors scrambling to make their way on Pangaea, knowing that they could not do it alone. In short, they were just like us, except they had turned to the Bachums, who offered them safety in exchange for their blind commitment to their ridiculously unrealistic vision of God. In time, they would find their way to us, and if I could convince Don that they were on our side, we could protect them, too.
“Don Abba, you have yourself a deal.” After lighting up yet another cigarette, I reached my hand out to him.
“Really?” He asked, and when his comically large eyes widened, I chuckled softly. Very enthusiastically, he shook my hand.
“Yes.”
“I was so prepared for you to refuse that I don't know what to say now.”
“Just say that we're going to make this work. We're going to figure this out. In the end, everything will turn out in our favor.”
“We're going to figure this out. We're going to make it work.” He told me instantly.
“Yes. Do you know how we can start? You can let that woman and her two children out of lockup.”
He grimaced.
“Are you sure?”
“I am positive.”
For a moment, he looked thoughtful. Then he nodded, and in his heart, I could sense an acknowledgment that I was right. When he reached the stairs that led down to the cells, he turned back to me.
“I am very sorry for what I did to Maura. Though she did admit that she knows what they're planning, I could have gone about getting my answers in a different way. It's amazing, how quickly guilt starts to kick in. Pray that you never feel this.” He was silent for a minute, his eyes fixated on a crack in the concrete floor beneath our feet. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, resigned to a fact that saddened and disgusted him. “I know that I'm sick, Brynna. You might not see it as sickness, but it's uncontrollable, just like a fatal disease. That's why I need you. I need you to help me avoid the worst in myself.”
“I know you do.” I told him somewhat gently. “I'll help you any way I can, Don. If Maura dies today, there will be anger towards you, great anger that I will control just barely. But I do believe in time and with our joint mission in mind, I will overcome it.”
“Fair enough.” He replied. “But will you forgive me for it?”
I looked into the room when Maura called my name again. I looked back at him and shook my head before saying softly and resolutely, “No.”
“Brynna, please just come in here!” Violet screamed to me through her tears. Begrudgingly, I walked into the room. Maura, even when her eyes were open, was not conscious. When she spoke, she spoke to my father, Violet, her mother, Elijah, Penny, and Lucien. Never once did she speak to me. Now, she was calling out for me. I could not afford the anger that I felt towards her for that. I didn't understand why it was there, but I knew that her condition was worsening. If the worst was going to happen, I had to let that anger go.
I had to let it go.
“I need you both to leave for a few minutes.” I told Elijah and Violet, who looked at me curiously.
“Why?” Violet asked. “Brynn, what if she...”
“If she does, I would prefer you not see it.”
“But I need to be with her, Brynna!” Violet wailed before throwing her arms around my neck and crying into them. I rubbed her back comfortingly.
“Violet, I need you to trust me on that. You do not need to see her die. Now, just in case it happens while I'm here, say your goodbyes now.”
“Brynn, Jesus Christ!” Elijah was stunned by my blunt order. He was too young to understand.
“Elijah, I am not going to shield either of you from the grave severity of the situation. You do not deserve to be lied to. I would not forgive myself if you two never got a chance to tell her goodbye.”
Elijah glared at me for a moment and then knelt down beside the bed, his mouth close to Maura's ear.
“I know you're in pain. I'm so sorry for that, Maura. They said that there's nothing we can do. I should have stopped them. I did try. I told them there was nothing that you could tell them. But they didn't listen, and I should have broken down the door. I should have run in there and killed them all for what they were doing.”
Regret. It cascaded from the tip of his consciousness like acidic rain. Every other thought melted away as the drops burst open against them. I hated that he now had the means to torment himself forever.
“I know what happened...” He told her as tears began to leak from his eyes. “I know what you did with Brynna. I don't understand it. But it doesn't matter now. She doesn't want me to be angry at you.”
Maura gave a soft moan of agony. I wondered if it was in response to what he had said.
“So I'm not angry. If this is it, Maura, I just need you to take that with you, okay? I need you to know that.”
My own throat clenched. I held Violet tighter, focusing my energy on keeping my tears at bay. I would not cry.
“I need you to know that I love you. That is just about the most clichéd thing to say, and I know that if you can hear me, you're rolling your eyes and telling me to come up with something more original,” We all laughed softly at that. “But that's the best I've got.”
“It's plenty, Eli.” I assured him, “It may be clichéd, but it's plenty.”
He nodded, squeezed my shoulder, swiped at his eyes, and left the room.
“Alright, honey, your turn.” I told Violet softly. She took Elijah's place beside the bed.
“Maura...” She managed to croak out. Then she sprang up, threw her arms over Maura, and cried hysterically into her chest. “I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!”
“Shh...” I whispered as I eased her up off of Maura. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I promised her I'd keep her safe! I said I'd take care of her, Brynn! I failed her. Don't you see? I failed her!” She cried to me uncontrollably. I struggled not to grasp my chest or contort my face into an expression of pain as my heart broke for her.
“You didn't!” I told her firmly. Some of my earlier ice resurfaced, but its new life was not bred from a desire to push her away. It was meant to convince her of a truth that would heal her grief, however minimally. “There was nothing you could have done, Violet Mae. Don is cruel and relentless in his pursuit of answers. Maura told him outwardly that she knew what they are planning, and though this is certainly not her fault, if she had lied…” I stopped, re-routed. “Never mind. Regardless of what could have been, she would not want you to feel any sense of responsibility or any guilt over what has happened to her. That is the last thing she would want.”
Violet looked up at Maura's bruised and bloodied face. She kissed her forehead gently.
“I love you, Maura. Please don't die. Please, I need you.”
“Alright. Go with Elijah.” I took her hand and steered her towards the door. When I opened it, Alice and Quinn had come downstairs. A look passed between Alice and me. Immediately, she knew that I was going to ask her to watch over my sister. She nodded and squeezed my hand. I was stunned briefly that she understood so clearly. A surge of love for her went through me. I realized that she and Quinn were my friends. I pondered the implications of that even as I closed the door to the room.
When I turned back to Maura, my mind went blank. Her eyes had opened. Not only was she awake, but she was present.
“Brynna?” She asked weakly with tears rolling down her cheeks. Painfully, she turned her head to look at me. I walked forward slowly, not knowing what to say. I would not unleash the rage I felt towards her for what happened. In her final moments, she did not deserve to feel guilt or sadness. I sincerely doubted that anyone deserved to feel such things during the final remainder of their time in our known realm.
“Will you sit with me?” She asked timidly before reaching her hand out to me with great effort.
I nodded and sat down beside her. After a moment, she lowered her hand, realizing that I was not going to take it. She knew the pain of the previous years would not allow such a show of support and love. What was worse is that she accepted and understood that.
“I owe you more apologies than I can count. And this is my last chance…” She whispered. I had to lean forward to hear her. In her voice, I heard her strength fading slowly.
“That's not important. Did you hear Elijah and Violet?” I asked her, and she shook her head. “Well, they begged you not to die. So stop talking like you are.”
“I was waiting for you.” She told me with a tiny smile on her swollen lips. “I wanted you to be with me when I woke up. I need to tell you how sorry I am for everything.”
“It's over. It's in the past.” I said in an unconvincing, robotic tone. What else could be said?
“No.” She shook her head, “Stop it. I do not deserve for you to forgive me so easily.”
“Maura, I don't want to talk about this!” I shot at her when I felt tears well in my eyes suddenly.
“I was a coward. I was afraid of what Michael was going to do to me. I deserve a lifetime in hell for allowing him to do what he did to you. It's all my fault. Everything you feel now is my fault. I’ve never taken responsibility for it, not once. I have never told you that none of it is your fault. Not Michael, not Luc, not your parents… It’s my fault, Brynna.” She was crying again and straining to continue. “I know that. I deserve everything that has happened to me. I do, Brynna.”
“Stop it!” I whispered firmly as the tears brimmed and prepared to fall.
“I love you, and I am so sorry. I don't expect you to forgive me. You don't owe me that. What I want more than for my guilt to go away is for you to be alright, Brynna. I just want you to live a happy life. I want you to fall in love. I want you to have children of your own someday, because you will be the best mother. Just look at how you are with Penny, darling...”
“I will not be engaging in such foolish triviality again. I fell in love once, and it ended terribly. I loved a man who was nothing more than a liar.”
“He was nothing.”
“He was everything, Maura!” I exclaimed in indignation before jumping up and starting to pace. “He is the only man I have ever trusted. He is the only man I have ever loved! And the only reason we met is because Adam sent him after me!”
“I know how badly it hurts you.”
“It doesn't hurt me!” I snapped at her. “It pisses me off! God, you were right all along, weren’t you? That is the absolute worst part of it! You always said to never let them in, because this is what they will do. This is how it always ends, right? I let this man into my life, I fell in love with him in what was practically an instant, and I allowed myself to love him so much, and now he is gone, the same way that Rachel is gone, except James is still alive, but it doesn’t matter, because I will never let him back into my life or Penny’s life! And all of this could have been avoided if I had just… just…”
It went back beyond our first kiss. It went back to our first meeting. I could not discern the exact moment when I realized it was a possibility that I could have romantic feelings for him. Was it when he had grasped my hand in the car? Was it when he had patched up my head and my arm in his apartment, allowing me to hold a knife because I was still so distrustful of him? Was it when he had begun to gain my trust in the diner, when we had experienced together the horror he had originally felt alone at the fast-approaching end of the world? Was it when he had lit my cigarette? All of those instances seemed to have occurred thousands of years earlier. But when was it, exactly, that I should have ordered myself never to feel for him? 
“Stop.” She whispered. “Sit down.”
I stopped walking when I felt my heart racing and my head spinning. I sat down beside her again, knowing I would collapse if I continued to stand.
“I know it doesn't seem like it, but you will love again, Brynna. I know that I warned you against them. I know that my own love life is not an example. But you will love someone again, and they will be good, and strong, and they will love you, too. They will never inflict this pain on you. All of those ideals you told me about from your books, all of those things that you said you don’t believe in… They’re real, Brynna. They’re real, and you deserve them. You will have every last one of them, my darling.”
I shook my head slightly, though I wanted so desperately to believe her. When I looked at her, my tears had multiplied. She saw them and reached out to wipe them away.
“Do you promise?” I whispered in the voice of a child.
She nodded and smiled weakly.
“I promise.”
She gave a weak moan of pain again. I reached out and grabbed hold of her hands. I brought them to my chest and held them tightly. A feeling took my breath away when it emerged suddenly. I realized that I needed her. I realized that everything, every terrible moment in our joint past, didn't matter anymore. It was of the old world, and the old world was gone. I had promised that Pangaea would be a new start for everyone and yet I held old world grudges. I allowed myself to succumb to old-world pain.
I had to let it go.
“Maura, I just realized something.”
“Yeah?” She managed to mutter as she opened her eyes.
“I need you. I cannot do this without you.”
“Shh...” She wiped my eyes again. “You can do anything, Brynna Claire. Anything, do you understand me?”
“But I need you to stay with me!” My voice cracked, and a stray tear streamed down my cheek.
“I said,” She cringed in pain for a moment, stifling a soft moan. “I said, 'Do you understand?'”
I nodded and moved closer to her.
“Stay with me. Stay with me, Maura.” I whispered after pressing my forehead to hers. Her hands grasped my face. As the tears finally fell, I whispered words I had not said to her in many, many years:
 “I love you.”
“I know you do. I need you to know that I know that, and have always known it, alright? And I love you, too. I need you to know that, too. I have hurt you terribly… and yet I love you the most.”
A sob escaped me, and I felt her tears running down her face onto my hands.
“I love you so much, my beautiful Brynna.”
So clichéd, and yet the only words that could ever matter. Her lips kissed my cheek twice. I laid my head against her chest, crying harder when I felt her arms wrapping around me.
“It's alright, honey.” She whispered to me as I sobbed and held onto her for all the life left in us both, “Shh... Everything is going to be alright, my sweet girl. I promise you. I promise, darling.”
At the end of her life, she had resumed the task she had taken at the beginning of mine; she calmed my cries with ease and gentleness while I was bundled up snugly in her arms. We were, most definitely, consumed by one of life's full circles.
“I wanted it to be you… here with me.”
I nodded and held onto her even more tightly.
“I'm here.” I whispered back through my tears.
I still don't know how long we laid there before I heard her breathing and heartbeat slow and stop. But I will tell you that there is one thing I know for sure, and you might not believe it: When I sat up, the weight of the pain had lifted. I nearly toppled over from the new lightness of my being. I looked down at her, at how she looked to be merely asleep, and though my tears still fell, I knew that in her last moments, she had taken the pain from me. She would carry it for me far away, to wherever she was going, where it could never harm me again. That was her final gift to me. That was her final act of repentance and apology.
“Come on.” Elijah was saying softly to me. I hadn't realized that he had come to check on me. Now, I was the one being steered from the room. I was the one being escorted, mercifully, from the terrible sadness of Maura's death. I had never imagined that I would feel a thing. I had never guessed I would grieve her passing. But then, even when I hated her, I had always loved her. Love and hate are so very close, after all.
My immediate action upon reentering the hall was to embrace Violet. Upon seeing my tear-streaked face, she knew the worst had happened. Her sobs were painful, twisting and wringing my insides dry. But they were cleansing, at least on her end. They were the audible expulsion of her own grief. For her, crying relieved the pain.
When the building shook, I assumed my internal explosive energy had manifested in an imaginary outer display. But upon seeing the alarmed looks on the teary faces of Alice, Quinn, and Elijah, I realized that something really was happening. The darkness had come. It was beating down our door, ready to destroy us as we stood in its path.
“Take them and find James! Run!” The words tumbled from my mouth towards Elijah as the imminent danger of the situation registered clearly in my mind. I did not know exactly what was occurring above our heads, nor did I want to send my friends and family to James for assistance, but I knew swift action was necessary. In fact, it was the only crucial link between us and our lives continuing past the present.
Adam ran into the corridor just as I ducked back into the room with Maura. I couldn't leave her. I could hear him shouting to my friends and siblings, ordering them to get out of the building. But I could not leave Maura's body, not when she, like everyone else both good and evil, deserved to be buried properly. After all she had suffered, I had to put her to rest.
“We have to go!” Adam was shouting at me now. “They're here!”
“Who?” My tone betrayed my apathy. I cared nothing for the war anymore. The day, the place, everything about the whole ordeal had taken a toll on me. I could not afford a scrap of emotion, as I was already being contorted and tormented by the pain of Maura's death and the stinging betrayal left by the truth I had learned about James.
“They stole the sun harness!”
“Adam, what the hell is a sun harness?” I asked, my voice never rising above a mere murmur.
“It doesn't matter what it is! We need to go now!”
“I will not leave her.”
“What are you talking about, Brynna?” He demanded dangerously as he walked closer to me. “She is gone. There is nothing more you can do for her.”
“I can bury her. I don't know if that is a custom...”
“Be quiet. Get up. Let's go.” He ordered and a hazardous nuclear explosion of fury blasted mightily inside of me. I stood up, whipped around, stormed towards him, and shoved him hard in his firm chest.
“If it wasn't for you, she would still be here!” I shouted before pushing him again. Surprisingly, I was able to make him stumble back a step. “You and your pitifully stupid war! And you sent James! I fell in love with him, and it was all a lie! Why did you do this?!” I opened my hand, brought it up to his face, and slapped him hard. I was a fan of slapping. I was finding that it was the only remedy for certain infuriating things. It truly did help.
“Brynna, I will explain everything to you!” He grabbed both of my wrists in a painful hold. I grimaced but fought wildly to free them from his grasp only to find that he was as strong as he looked; he never lost or even weakened his grip.
The ceiling shed dust on the next impact. I could smell smoke. A fire had taken hold of the building and soon, we would be consumed by it. Adam was right; we had to leave. But one glance at Maura's peacefully absent body strengthened my resolve to stay.
“I'll carry her out. In a few minutes, I'll have gathered the strength to carry her.”
“We don't have a few minutes!” His voice thundered deafeningly. I had angered him, and I knew it. Under normal circumstances, my bullheaded nature entertained him, but as the fire ate through the walls around us, closing in for the kill, he found my tendency to dig my heels in frustrating and also, potentially deadly. I would have been substantially irritated by such stubbornness, as well.
“Go!” I shouted back at him just as loudly. The fire would not be what brought the building down; our shouting match certainly would.
“You're going to carry her?” He grabbed the tops of my arms after I turned away from him to kneel at Maura's bedside.
“Yes.” I shot at him defiantly.
“No.” He snarled before yanking me upwards so I was standing on my feet. “I am going to carry you.”
I was over his shoulder, and he was ramming himself into the blocked door before I had even processed his words completely.
“NO!” I screamed as I struggled to throw myself off of him. In one fluid motion, he adjusted me on his shoulder, strengthened his hold on me, and rammed into the door again. The force with which he hit it sent it flying off its hinges, pinning the piece of debris that had been blocking it against the opposite wall. I watched the room behind us fill with thick smoke; Maura disappeared from my view.
“No, no, no!” I grabbed both sides of the door frame and held on tight. In time, he would get frustrated and drop me onto the floor. Then, he would run for the stairway, dodging flaming pieces falling from the roof before hurtling up the steps and saving himself. By that time, I would not be able to save myself or Maura's body. I would simply curl up beside her and await the final moment. No one would be perched mournfully beside me, apologizing for how they had wronged me, telling me they loved me, or even lying to me, saying that everything would be alright. I would prefer it that way. No symphony of emotionally heavy words and empty reassurances would be necessary. The only soundtrack I would need to my last coherent thoughts would be the crackling of the fire and the bone-shaking explosions overhead. I had heard that in home fires, smoke was the killer, not the flames. Surely, though, my death would still be painful; I would struggle to draw clean air into my lungs but instead, would only breathe toxic, heavy, black smoke. I would suffocate, to put it simply. But at least I would not burn.
“I will hurt you if you do not let go!” Adam shouted once again. I did not doubt his sincerity.
“I'm not leaving her!” I shrieked. I had graduated from struggling to fall out of his grasp to kicking my feet into his stomach so he would drop me. “I can't leave her! Don't you see?! She might have left me before, but if I was gone, she wouldn't leave! I know that! I know it, and I can't leave her, Adam!” The tears running down my cheeks were not a result of the coarse smoke stinging my eyes. The crack in my voice softened him. Instead of hurting me, he pulled me forward, turned me sideways and cradled me in his arms.
“It is just her body.” He whispered to me. “You know that. Her soul is safe.”
I stared up into his eyes. That quickly, I accepted his words. I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he was right. There was no use risking my life to bury an empty shell. The most essential part of her essence was already safe, sent back to the source from which we all were sprung. I hoped that there was a merciful one God, who welcomed her through the fabled gates of Heaven with open arms. I hoped wherever she was that she was safe. As I hoped and prayed for her eternal happiness, my arms flung up to wrap around Adam's neck. I held onto him tightly, closing my eyes so as not to see Maura's body disappear from view. Though Adam had convinced me that she was safe, I could not bear to see her body consumed in flames. Old-world thinking persisted, even then.
We were moving quickly, though Adam was not running. Never once did he attempt to put me down as he maneuvered through the fallen, burning rubble. In fact, I could sense that he preferred having me nestled safely in his arms. There, I could not be hurt. What strange thoughts for him to be having... Quickly, I determined that he knew if I were to perish in the fire, I could not agree to help him.
“That is foolishness far below you, Brynna Olivier.” He muttered to me as he kicked open the door at the top of the stairs. I looked up at him, my eyes wide. “Not very amusing when the tables turn, is it?”
I turned my head to the side, stunned to find that I was breathing fresh air. We had emerged onto long dirt pathway leading to the gate in front of Adam's mansion. We turned back to look up, only to find that the entire house had gone up in flames. I looked at him, shocked to see that there was not a shred of pain evident in his eyes. Seeing his house burn didn't faze him in the slightest. Still, I grasped his hand. If I were watching my home of so many years crumble to the ground before me, I would certainly want someone to comfort me, though I would not ask for it, and I would prefer their condolence to be silent and simple.
“Come on.” I whispered to him. “We have to go.”
He nodded, and we turned away, only to find ourselves surrounded. Having been lost in our thoughts, we did not sense the angry horde of Bachum supporters approaching. In their minds, I heard shrill cries of gratitude to a mortal man, though I could not decipher exactly whose face it was that they were holding so firmly at the forefront of their minds. They owed him their lives, according to Tyre, for he had stolen the sun harness. He was one of ours, buried deep within our camp, exactly as Elijah had told James. This man was hidden so deeply, even to them, that they could not picture him clearly. But whoever he was, he was still amongst our numbers, and if Adam and I managed to escape the city—a scenario that was growing increasingly less likely—I knew that it was imperative to seek out him and his accomplices. 
“What in the name of the one God or Gods is a sun harness?”
“Contextual clues, my dear. Think on it for a moment.” Adam replied as he put his arm in front of me and moved me behind him. I moved right back out to stand beside him. I would face the mob of fanatical crazies with him, for I was not afraid in the slightest.
“You will run when I say so.” Adam muttered to me firmly as Tyre moved to the front of the crowd. There was another deafening bang that rattled the earth, and the building fifty feet from Adam's mansion fell to the ground in flaming scraps. I did not nod in affirmation to Adam's order. He glared at me, ordering me to nod or say out loud that I understood. I raised my eyebrows, cocked my head to the side slightly, and glared back at him. I think if I were a man, he would have punched me.
“Well, I never thought I would see the day when you were found wandering about without your guards.”
Tyre was even more menacing in the dim, smoke-filled twilight. His eyes reflected the darkest hues of the earth. His pale white skin eerily contrasted with the darkness of his eyes and his prominent nose that sat between them proudly. While many men on Pangaea were healthily muscular, Tyre was unbelievably tall—almost seven feet, at least!—and almost dangerously thin. The immortality of the other men I knew had never drained the traces of vibrant youth. Tyre had been sucked dry of such fresh beauty. The man seemed born to play the ghoulishly gaunt villain in a horror movie. The cliché was not lost on me, and I almost laughed to myself as it became clear.
“Brynna Olivier...” He turned his gleaming white grin of triumph to me. I scowled at him defiantly. “I have been told by your father that you now know all. Pity you did not join us. Now, who knows?”
“I know. Isn't that why you wanted me dead, Tyre?” I challenged him. “So, where is your lapdog? I have so desperately wanted to meet Rich Bachum.”
“He's powering the harness, of course.” Tyre replied in a voice of dangerous elation. “Come now, Adam, let us make this quick.” Anger pulsed beneath the cool and collected facade. A barbaric glee was beginning to rear its head inside of him. He had finally won. It had been hundreds of years since Adam had tossed him and his people from the city he had not wanted built, and finally, he could dole out Adam's last punishment.
“You will not attempt to fight me, will you? You and those two humans are three of a kind, Tyre.” Adam was grinning ear-to-ear, genuinely amused by whatever it was he sensed in Tyre. “You're cowards more likely to sneak up on your foes in the night than to stand face-to-face with them. You will make deals in the hopes of being spared, deserting all you believe just to breathe the air here for another day.”
“I have never made a deal with you! I would never be so foolish!” Tyre hissed venomously, his fangs forming far more slowly than ours did. “This girl has, hasn't she? Otherwise, her father would have killed her by now. But no, she stands here before me in perfect condition, and thank the God for that! I can now end her myself.”
Adam's calm ambivalence disappeared in a blink. I felt the change in him several seconds before I looked over. Upon looking into his red eyes, I knew that a fight would ensue between them. He would, for whatever reason, fight for me. I could not understand why, and he had no time to explain. I do not think that he would have, even if we had ages to talk.
“If you so much as turn your gaze to her,” When he began to speak, his voice was a furious whisper. But as he continued, it rose to its intimidatingly forceful thunder. “I will destroy every man around you before I KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND!”
Whoa... My eyes were wide, and my eyebrows were raised in shock. When Tyre did turn his gaze to me, it was a direct provocation that was imprudent, to say the very least. Adam's fangs sprung out, and he lunged forward; the roar that erupted from him made his thunderous shouts seem like mere whispers in the dark. His hand was locked firmly around Tyre's throat when six of the enemy's men pulled him off. Even as they forced Adam onto his knees, I could see the terror in their eyes that he would break free and slaughter them all effortlessly. Beneath that fear, though, I could see their lusting fury; they wanted to see him killed. They wanted to congratulate themselves and each other after it was over. They wanted to revel in the war's ending, knowing they had won.
Tyre rose to his feet, smiling in sadistic glee. From behind him, a man handed over a large, curved sword. Adam never fought to free himself. His pride would not allow it. Even as Tyre brought the sword above his head and froze, the smirk never left Adam's face.
“STOP!” I stunned both myself and the men around me with my scream of protest. Even Adam was surprised, though he hid it well.
“You are next, my dear.” Tyre grinned at me.
“Run.” Adam instructed me calmly.
“NO!” I shouted.
“Do not let her run. You all will pay a price if she gets away!” Tyre shouted at them.
“Run now, Brynna.” Adam's words were still infused with a lightness that was so out of place in the current conundrum. He sounded as though he was telling a mildly humorous joke. I could have stabbed him myself.
When one man walked forward to hold me in place, my own beast burst out of its cage in a grandiose, violent escape. I closed the space between that man and I before jumping up and locking my legs on either side of his torso. I grabbed a hold of his head in both hands, practically salivating as I pictured sinking my teeth down into his throat. My head jerked up to the sky, and I screeched shrilly at the heavens. When the sound drained out of me completely, I twisted my hands, spinning the man's head around on his neck. He crumpled to the ground beneath me; I was still attached to him, and yet I managed to land gracefully on my knees. My head jerked up in time to see that I had created a necessary diversion. The men holding Adam were in a state of horror that slackened their grip on him.
My own fighting abilities were lackluster in comparison to his brutal strength. In one swipe, he swung his arm back, colliding with each man and sending him flying backwards into the gates outside of his house that now stood in rubble. Tyre snapped out of whatever daze he was in and brought the knife down. Adam dodged the blade in time for it to miss his chest but still, it made contact, plunging deep into his stomach. He grimaced in pain only slightly.
“Do not look at me! Fight them!” He bellowed at me.
Whatever daze I was in, I abruptly came out of to join the common realm once again. Instantly, I sprung into action; I ran past a man charging me and snatched the dagger he was carrying right out of his hand.
Alright, genetic mutation. Show me what I can do, I thought just as a man got close enough for me to strike.
I stretched my arm out, spun in a circle and heard the sickening slash of skin as the knife cut through the charging man's throat. I felt the warm spray of blood on my arm as I slammed my hand onto the ground to stop my body from spinning anymore. Without looking, I threw the knife sideways; I heard another man's bones cracking around the serrated blade after it forcefully entered his chest cavity. My head jerked in my second victim's direction before my legs carried me to him. He was falling forward, grasping his chest. In a blur of movement, I ripped the knife from his chest, placed my hands on his shoulders, and propelled myself into a flip through the air before landing on my feet.
Two younger men were facing me. In them, I sensed no darkness. I saw no evil in their hearts as I had seen inside of the others I had just killed. They stared at me in horror, trembling, awaiting my move. The guns in their hands rattled as they shook. They never raised them.
“Go home, gentlemen.” I whispered after taking a much needed deep breath.
They looked at me, looked at each other, and then turned to run. Two gunshots rang out behind me, and I looked down at myself; they were loud enough that I knew they had been made by a sufficiently large shotgun. If I had been shot, the bullets would have blown open a hole in my abdomen, given the close proximity of the shooter.
But I was not the wounded party; the two boys who had run were. They had fallen to the ground, their top halves messes of blood and flesh. I will admit that I felt an unimaginably strong surge of pain through my body at seeing such innocent creatures taken so cruelly before what could ever rightfully be their time. As the despair assuaged, outrage took its place. I knew exactly who stood behind me, wielding that gun. Only he would feel the need to carry such a large weapon, for he would not accept nature's power.
Rich Bachum turned the muzzle of the shotgun so that it was pointed at me. I understood suddenly why Adam showed and perhaps felt no fear. He wished to die an honorable death. I would never fall to my knees, sniveling and pleading like a coward. I would not shed a tear. I would not attempt to forge a deal. I would die the same way I had always lived: in defiance of cowardice.
“At last we meet, Mr. Bachum.”
“Do not say my name, you disgusting freak! You don’t get to say my name!” He shouted, and I frowned in revulsion when a large wad of spit flew from his mouth as he spoke.
“I can sense that I have been living in your mind rent-free, as they say.”
“You were raised well! You're from Earth! You...” He took a step towards me, “Vile...” Another step, and he raised the shotgun so it was aligned with my head, “Whore!”
I expected him to fire after he was finished that particular sentiment. However, his shaking hands just held the gun even more firmly.
“Ooh...” I sang with a grin and chuckle, “Vile! An honorable choice of words, Mr. Bachum.”
“What did I just say?! I do not want to hear my name coming from your disgusting mouth!”
“Pull the trigger, Mr. Bachum.” I ordered softly, tauntingly.
“I am warning you!”
“Are you a big enough man to do it, Mr. Bachum?”
I took a step towards him, my grin widening as I realized that I already knew the pathetic answer to the question I had just posed. He could not pull the trigger. In my heart, I felt nothing but pride and audacity. In his, I felt great fear.
“You stand above others because you know all.” My tone dripped condescension and sarcasm, which I’m sure does not surprise you at this point. “Yet, you stand now before just little me,” I held my arms out to the side, “And you're speechless. You're motionless. You know not what to do. You're terrified because you've never killed a woman. You've beaten them and degraded them terribly, but can you willingly kill one? No, your lapdogs do that for you.”
“You don't know what I'm thinking.”
“Your mind is screaming.” I spun my hands beside my head to mime the churning stream of thoughts that were pouring from his mind. “I can hear everything.”
“You're crazy!” He bellowed furiously, but his voice cracked on the last word. I covered my mouth to suppress the giggle that took hold of me. “You're lying! You can’t hear me!”
“If I don't do this, she'll kill Mary.”
“If I don't do this, she'll kill Mary.” I repeated and my grin widened as his frown deepened.
“How is she doing that?!”
“How is she doing that?!” I shouted up at the sky. I was acting quite manically, I admit... The adrenaline has that effect.
“Oh my God, the devil is real. He has her! Oh, dear God...”
“Oh, dear God! Oh, dear God! Oh, dear God!” I shouted, all evidence of whimsy extinguishing each time I said those words until I was snarling them at him viciously. Now, only that painful, familiar rage stood firmly in my chest to spur me to further action. “Just because I don't believe in your warped perception of God does not mean I'm in line with the devil, Mr. Bachum!” 
I was walking towards him now, willing him to put his finger on the trigger. I could end him. Sure, if Rich fell, the war would not end. But Tyre would be short an arm; he would be amputated and vulnerable to our attack. Adam's city was burning around me. I could hear the screams of his people as they scrambled for the city limits. When I closed my eyes briefly, I saw men, women, and children running in terror and disappearing through the wall into the darkness of the forest. I saw others belonging to Tyre pulling back a thick golden string on the back of a large, glass, circular bowl poised towards the sky. The sun darkened overhead as one of its rays was sucked into the bowl. One of his men turned the device so it would fire into one of the crowds of screaming, terrified people. I opened my eyes just as a fire more powerful than any that could erupt from a man-made bomb consumed them.
It had taken exactly one second to see all that I had seen. My power was growing stronger.
“This is a win-win for both of us, Rich.” I told him softly. “If we live, we live another day. If we die, well...” I smiled and shook my head slightly as I studied his face. “One of us will know the truth about all this, won't we?”
“You know nothing of ‘all this!’ You know nothing of anything!”
I blinked at him.
“Too easy.” I murmured.
“If you did, you would not align with Adam! You would not allow yourself to be twisted into some filthy creature from this world! You don't deserve a minute of life if you think that all of this is right!”
I realized suddenly that all the men who had surrounded us were dead. Tyre had run off when he realized that he was the only target left for Adam to disembowel. I was staring down the business end of a shotgun that was being pointed at me by a deranged, fanatical lunatic, and yet Adam had not stepped in to intervene. Perhaps he was allowing me to handle the situation on my own. I appreciated his belief in me. I appreciated his willingness to let me dispatch the threat that stood so firmly and tremulously before me alone.
No. I realized that something was not right.
I reached forward and grabbed the muzzle of the gun. With a quick, powerful jerk of my arm, I was able to pull it from Rich's grasp and send him down onto his knees. He looked up at me, willing me to shoot him. Only after being martyred in this “holy” war would he earn his place at God's side. His ignorance and his blind devotion to that phantom version of God brought about the strangest feeling in me: pity.
“We find ourselves at an impasse, Rich.” I told him as I put the gun over my shoulder. “I will not shoot you because I will not spoil you with a death you and your despicable wife would be proud of. Goodbye for now. I know next time you will not hesitate.”
Like the contemptible coward he was, he ran. Later, I knew Tyre would make him pay for not killing me. Rich knew of the consequences and still, he did not fight me. I turned back to watch him disappear from view, knowing that he and I would meet again, knowing that I would be the one to kill him or vice-versa. Either way, one of us would end the other.
“Adam?” I asked as I turned around. Amongst the pile of bodies, I could not see him. My exhaustion seemed to have intensified. My legs dragged as I walked through the carnage. I struggled to raise them when I had to step over the fallen men.
“Adam?!” I asked again, too tired to suppress the fear for him that was so evident in my voice.
“Here.”
His voice was barely audible, even in the silence. In it, I heard his pain. I forced my tired body to move quickly, knowing he was hurt badly. I did not want to imagine, even for a moment, that he might die. While his personality and his actions antagonized me to no end, sometimes purposely, I couldn't stand to lose someone else, even the man who from the moment I met him, had stirred a great, raging storm of conflicting emotions inside of me.
“Hey...” I whispered gently before kneeling beside him. As soon as I had steadied myself, I pressed my hand to the wound in his stomach. His warm blood streamed over my hand, saturating my skin with the darkest red I had ever seen.
“It's fatal, Brynna.”
“Stop it.” I ordered firmly. “Come on. We need to leave. Before he left, Rich thought about the others and bringing them back here to finish us off. I also saw more fire from the harness. We need to go.”
“You need to go. There is no help for me.” He told me in a tone firm enough to rival my own yet still displaying his weak and pained state. An explosion of empathy overtook me, and I knew then that I could not leave him.
“My city will burn. It is my duty and my humblest privilege to stay and burn with it.”
“This is like the captain going down with the ship.” I told him. “And though it is very honorable, you are far too important to die now. Think about your dear friend Don. He would be lost without you. Now, get up.”
“I cannot walk. It is fatal, Brynna. You must go.”
“Stop saying that.” I took his arm and wrapped it around my neck. “On three, okay? One, two, three!” I pulled him forward, and he moved his feet back, turning his body to rise onto his knees. The pain had to have been tremendous, unimaginable... Still, he did not make a sound.
“I must stay.” He gasped out. “I must stay here to die, Brynna. This is my city.”
We were both on our knees facing one another. My face was very close to his. As my empathy grew for him, I did something unexpected: I closed the space between us and planted a quick, warm kiss on his cheek.
“I know. But this is your world, also. It is overrun by the Bachums, their people, and their message that is a perversion of all we know and believe. We can only save Pang… Purissimus… with your help, Adam.”
His rough hand came up to grasp my cheek. The scorching heat between us had nothing to do with the building that had just collapsed beside us in an almighty explosion of fire and debris. His eyes hypnotized me into a beautifully tranquil space that erased all fear and pain. Stranger even is the fact that I could see a similar lull in his eyes as he gazed into mine.
I shook my head back and forth rapidly and frowned slightly.
“Alright, we need to get you on your feet. One, two, three!”
He did emit one almost inaudible groan of pain when I pulled him even harder. My hand was pressed over the one of his that he had covering the wound. Once I had successfully gotten him onto his feet, he stumbled into me, nearly knocking both of us back to the ground. I dug my heels into the blood-soaked earth and slid backwards in the soggy moisture for one unsure minute. Then, my strength registered finitely in my arms and torso, and I was able to hold him, despite his great mass.
“I'll try to walk as best as I can.” He gasped out to me as we both continued to hold his wound.
“Or I could carry you. You carried me earlier, and now, I owe you the same courtesy.” I told him in an effort to lighten the mood with a terrible joke. Sure enough, he chuckled weakly. The effort it took for him to force the laugh out pained him severely. I knew by the way he grimaced.
We took small, labored strides to move forward, away from the small battle we had just fought and won; away from the war we were fighting and losing. I ignored the growing ache in my shoulders and back and focused on him, knowing his pain was turning to agony and still, he would not show it to me. I focused on the tree line that grew closer very slowly with each step we took. I yearned for the shelter of the forest, where even the Bachums feared to tread. They had been spoiled by their open surroundings and therefore, knew nothing of the dangers within the trees. They would not risk their lives by traveling through the woods unless absolutely necessary. I knew that James was smart enough to hide Violet, Elijah, Penny, Alice, and Quinn within their age-old shelter. In my mind, I saw him ordering Don to turn Savannah, Oliver, and Ellie over to him. He had ushered them to safety as well. In the forest, he knew they would all be safe. 
Well, they would be safe from the Bachums.
The hill was the most arduous part of our journey. While I supported most of his weight, I also pushed him gently, giving him just enough momentum to move his feet up the steep slope. When we reached the top, I was using him to support myself almost as much as he was using me.
“You could have left me, you know.” He whispered to me as we both stood, catching our breath.
I looked up at him and scowled.
“Do you think so little of me?” My scowl dissolved into a dramatically disapproving frown. From the frown, a tiny smirk formed. Adam laughed the soft chuckle that was I was beginning to acknowledge as his trademark. Then, he pressed his lips to my forehead for a long, tender, thankful kiss. I jerked away, alarm springing to life uncomfortably inside of my chest. I couldn't afford to grow closer to him. I couldn't even afford the lack of physical distance between him and me. Our immediate closeness and our growing dependency on one another reminded me of James, and I cringed visibly.
“You and your aversion to feelings...” He shook his head slightly and tightened his grip on me for no other reason than that his legs were beginning to fail him. “That was only meant to thank you for saving my life. If I wished for romantic involvement with you, I would leave little room for doubt or deliberation.”
I spun us around to face the woods and walked forward quickly, leaving his feet struggling to move at the same pace.
“Keep talking like that, and you'll be crawling behind me.”
“At least I will be at the perfect level to watch you as you walk ahead of me.”
“You are repulsive!” I exclaimed as I slapped him very gently in the chest. Any more force than what I had used would send him falling to the ground. His bloodied hand came up quickly to grasp the one I had used to hit him. I looked up at him, entranced into silence by those beautiful eyes once again. James, Maura, and the burning city behind us disappeared from my conscious thoughts, and there was only that breathtakingly beautiful silence. There was only him, with his ruggedly handsome face, his muscular chest beneath my hand, and his strong body leaning against mine. There were no explosive bangs created by the sun's energy being thrust forcefully into the buildings Adam's people had labored endlessly to build. There was only the sound of our beating hearts; after we turned to face one another, I felt the strength of his thumping against the bones of my chest. I brought my hand up to rest on his scratchy, stubble-covered cheek. His rough hands moved my sweat and blood-drenched hair from my face. Rising up onto my tiptoes, I leaned into him...
Slut.
My brain broadcast the word on a spinning marquee. Maura’s voice read it out loud. Without hesitation, I pulled away and closed my eyes when he rested his forehead against mine. A bang so powerful that it shook the very land beneath our feet made us turn our attention to the city. The sun had disappeared from the sky, but the blinding light of its flames lit up the space before us. From within its painful luminescence, I watched the shadows of buildings crumble to ash; I watched the ash disappear into nothing. People unfortunate enough to be in the midst of their escape were blasted away, and I knew there would be no remains; not a bone, not a shred of skin...
I remembered another world, another time, another race being erased from existence in a thunderous display of God's power that rivaled the one I was seeing unfold before me. From the ashes of our Earth, we had been meant to travel the universe to a brave new world. We were meant to rebuild civilization and create a new life. Yet here we all were, scattered, afraid, and once again, on the brink of extinction. Since our arrival on the purest of planets, we had desecrated all of our God-given chances to create a new world from the debris of destruction.
We were, I am very sad to say, the living results of a shattered genesis. We were, beyond the forgiving shadow of doubt, failures of nature. No holy war could remedy such a persistent, painful truth. No lies or reassurances we would inevitably tell ourselves could change the certainty of our deficiency as a race or our impending, final demise.
When the last of that blinding light died away, the sun resumed its place in the sky only to be assailed by the black smoke of the fallen city. Its rays struggled to break through the blockade; as a result, an eerie haze was cast on the ashes and the few scraps of debris that had managed to survive the blast. The sight was beautiful in its own way, though disturbingly bizarre to the point of chilling every last drop of my blood. I had always wondered what a nuclear holocaust would look like, and the sun harness had produced such a scene for my viewing. I shook my head back and forth, reminding myself that so many of Adam's people and maybe even a few of my own had been killed. Whatever remained of their bodies now drifted away in the wind.
I was twirling through space, falling forever. There was nothing left. Every salvation, every moment of solace had been taken from us cruelly and without just cause. Every escape was merely an unnecessary detour on the road to the final scene, where we would be slaughtered painfully and without mercy. We would be taken from the worlds and lives we had so dirtied and contorted.
“Adam?” I asked softly. Both of my hands held his firmly.
“Yes?”
“I believe we have reached the end.”
In my peripheral vision, I saw him shake his head. He reached out and ran his finger along my jawline before turning my head so I could look into his eyes once again.
“My dear Brynna,” He whispered, “The darkest evil has not yet even broken the horizon.”

Book Two of the Eternity series, The Bargaining Path 
will be available in April 2014

The Shattered Genesis© and the Eternity Series© are copyrighted to T. Rudacille. Please do not distribute this work without permission of the author.